The recent Yelp scandals and what the company is doing about them
Should you really trust Yelp reviews?
Yelp has recently come under fire from business owners who have accused the company of manipulating reviews to ‘push’ for advertisements. One owner of a restaurant in Brooklyn, Danny Teran, posted a woeful tale about the review company further confirming consumers fears: that Yelp could actually be involved in review manipulation. Teran is not the only complainant, more business owners have claimed that negative reviews popped up after refusal to purchase advertising from Yelp.
These grievances have surfaced amid allegations of extortion from businesses to doctor reviews. In fact, a Yelp Spokesman admitted that the company receives around six requests monthly, ordering it to reveal information about anonymous reviewers. In 2013, Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s Attorney General, discovered that 19 companies had fake Yelp reviews, purposefully written to attract more customers. Those companies agreed to stop “astroturfing” and were required to pay hefty penalties.
Businesses are employing various ways to dupe Yelp. For example, they can create fake accounts and write reviews for themselves – using the services of creative writers. Worse, there are paid services that are propagating the act. Websites like Craigslist.com and Fiverr.com allow their users to hire people who perform these heinous tasks.
Another method, recently detailed in the New York Times, is to offer rebates to customers when they write reviews.
There are two main reasons behind false reviews: to trash one’s opponent/competitor and to inflate one’s ratings. For this reason, more businesses are out to leverage on Yelp’s massive traffic as the scramble for reviews continues to experience a surge. According to a study published by Michael Luca, boosting the Yelp ratings for a restaurant – by even one star – can translate to as much as a 9% increase in revenue. This discovery backs a Harvard Business School report that revealed an increase in the number of fake reviews from 5% in 2006 to 20% in 2013.
What is Yelp doing about fake reviews? According to a CBS News report, Yelp has initiated the fight against such reviews by conducting sting operations. The company has set up decoy businesses to try and catch review fraudsters. Ian MacBean, from Yelp, further confirmed that the company is sometimes among the first to respond to Fiverr or Craigslist offers for reviews.
That is not all, in 2012, Yelp started flagging businesses that recorded suspicious activity through the use of Consumer Alerts. The company identified businesses that had been caught red-handed – soliciting for reviews – and pinned an alert on their page to notify consumers about their malicious involvements.
Yelp’s number one defense against these incentivized reviews is the review filter. According to the company, the filter can track all the signals and make decisions on which reviews to display. However, Yelp has not publicized the algorithms that go into this filter; so, consumers have been left to make wild guesses.
By Brian Obudho
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