Regarding Yelp from an earlier post this morning, the hide reviews unless you pay for advertising.
Posted by
JaxSean (aka JaxSean)
May 17 '17, 14:53
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This was from one of our local pizza places (that really is amazing) FB post. I don't have any reason to not believe this is true, so...
If you think the below is TL:DR, the crux is:
74 out of 94 reviews were removed because the business wasn't spending at least $300/mo on Yelp "advertising".
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Weekly special, but first....
Hey Yelp....Go Yelp Yourself!
This post is in no way, shape or form a dig at yelpers. Some of them are our most loyal customers and we could not be more thankful! This is about Yelp as a company...
About 3 weeks ago an "industry expert" was explaining to me how important Yelp was in getting new people in the door at our restaurants.
For the three years that we have been open, we have done very little advertising outside of FB and have relied almost totally on word of mouth.
But because everything he said made sense, I went away from what I believe, and I private messaged some of our customers to ask if they would mind doing a Yelp review based on their experiences.
What a waste of time I spent, and unfortunately, what a waste of time our amazing customers spent because I had no idea what a freaking SCAM Yelp is!
I sent FB private messages to about 100 random customers that comment on our FB posts quite often and asked them to share their experience on a yelp review.
What happened next went from AMAZING to completely INFURIATING in less than a week!
Amazing: almost every single person that I messaged did a review...and most of the ones that didn't do a review respond back that they couldn't do one because they had already done one in the past...
Infuriating: as quickly as the reviews showed up on Yelp, the Yelp staff removed them and put them into a category called "not suggested" which means that they are hidden from the general public's view and don't count in our star rating.
After 10 days of David (our amazing GM) calling YELP customer service and getting employees giving him BS excuses like, "it's all a proprietary algorithm that we can't share" and "we will look into it and get back to you"...but then never calling us back...
So me being me, I finally got a friend of a close friend on the phone who actually works at Yelp HQ in San Francisco. He told me the truth that no one else would tell us...
He said, the "algorithm" factors heavily on how much you spend monthly in advertising with Yelp. The more money you spend, the more it deems the customers 5-star ratings as "good" and shows them while showing the poorer ratings as "not suggested", which doesn't show to the public or count in your rating.
Why does this suck? Because if I am a local Pizzeria that puts out a great product but can't afford to spend money on advertising then they purposefully withhold ratings...but a place right down the street that gives a crappy product but pays $300/mo on Yelp "advertising" is getting a higher percentage of good ratings showed to the public!!!
This is the antithesis of what free-sharing apps were supposed to be!!!
Below is EXACTLY the amount of YELP reviews that we got in each of our locations from February 1st through February 10th. It shows the total number of reviews, total that stayed viewable and total that yelp removed as "not recommended" (we can see them all on our administrator page).
And before anyone thinks that they've got it all figured out, let me give you these facts:
1. Not one of these are owners, employees or family of employees...everyone is a random customer.
2. SEVERAL of the "removed" reviews are people who have done many previous yelp reviews on other restaurants and quite a few that were removed are "elite" yelpers...meaning they have done a very high amount of reviews.
3. All reviews were done outside of our restaurants. I sent the messages over a 2-day period as the people commented on our FB page or did a FB review.
Here are the actual numbers...
San Marco – 26 Reviews from Feb 1 – Feb 10th: REMAIN: 7 Five Stars, 1 Four Star.
REMOVED: 18 Five Star Reviews
Jax Beach - 20 Reviews from Feb 1 – Feb 10th: REMAIN: 3 Five Stars, 1 Four Star.
REMOVED: 16 Five Star Reviews
Mandarin – 18 Reviews from Feb 1 – Feb 10th: REMAIN: 6 Five Stars
REMOVED: 12 Five Star Reviews
Gainesville - 30 Reviews from Feb 1 – Feb 10th: REMAIN: 1 Five Stars, 1 Four Star
REMOVED: 28 Five Star Reviews
That's a total of 94 reviews and they removed 74 of them so the public can't see them!
If anyone ever wonders why self-employed people look so stressed, it's because of total BS like this! I already hate asking customer to do anything for us, but to think that they did it for nothing REALLY pisses me off! Welcome to my world!
To the customers who wrote a review...I want to personally thank you for taking the time to do a review that, unfortunately, Yelp doesn't deem worthy to be shown publicly. While they don't value your opinion, we absolutely do, and would be nothing without your constant support!
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