Beating Yelp

There needs to be this list of businesses to give good reviews to on here. Yelp is now the 33rd most popular website in the US according to Alexa. Yelp has become a big player as far how much money local businesses get.

I say screw them. Every business gets irrational dumbasses nowadays who threaten bad reviews if you don't give them free stuff.

Now as for beating the Yelp filter, what would you do if you were Yelp and wanted to stop reviews? First you'd look at a ton of things from real reviews and fake reviews and try to find something statistically different probability wise. Yelp definitely looks at IP Address, what links you click on, how long you stay on each page, how long your reviews are, what kind of words you use, what time of day you leave reviews and log in, whether or not you leave a review when you log in, geolocation and IP netrange of the times you logged in with, screen resolution, etc etc...

The reason why they've filtered out your reviews is because your statistically out of the norm probability wise. The average Joe doesn't login their Yelp account from Comcast, Verizon, Cox, Time Warner, and Cable vision from five different computers for the five times they've logged in. They also don't usually quit yelp after leaving a review for one company. If a company with 35 reviews has 30 reviewers who've no longer use Yelp right after leaving a review, that also raises a red flag. Bottom line is that it's harder to generate fake reviews than you think. So Yelp not only checks the reviews that the person left, but also the reviews the company receives. If a company receives more reviews between the hours of 2-4pm, higher than the statistical average of all the reviews on Yelp, that also raises a red flag.

The solution is to have a list of businesses to give good reviews to, since we all got different IPs, screen res, and everything else to not stand out.

If you really examine which reviews stick, you'll see it's mostly based on time. Even reviewers that have made 1 review that are 1-2 years old have reviews that stick. Also if a review gets "Useful" checked by different IP's then the review tends to stick.

Actually most reviews are done by people who just come to make 1 review then leave, never put a picture, never edit their profile. Only those trying to game the system usually want to spend their lives reviewing sites, which is a pretty shameful life.

So here's the tricks I've learned so far:

1) use the same unique/private IP each time you make a review or access the site for each username
2) use your mobile phone to check in after you made the review (one mobile phone per review only)
3) click Useful from various different IP's (different computers and cities) on the review you made
4) don't make the mistake of crossing your IP paths/usernames/emails/profile information

What sucks most is that this is how the Matrix starts and leads to Yelp implants to keep us from "gaming" the system. Pretty f'ed up.

I've read the Yelp is much more likely to censor good reviews unless the business is paying for advertisements. I've also read that in the early years, Yelp themselves made fake reviews for cities outside of San Francisco just to get the site more popular!

I say screw them and I'm not going to bend over because of some jerk who thinks they can use Yelp to get their way. I remember this lady saying that she got touched at the bar by some stranger at a hotel so she was complaining at the front desk for two day free stay or she'll post a bad review.

This is not even about SEO anymore. I just want to be able to tell some people to get lost and post bad reviews instead of caving into their demands because I'll have a bunch of fake good reviews push their bad review out. You don't know what kind of people are out there unless you run a business or are a CSR yourself. Just search "Lady at Dunkin Donuts Goes Crazy Over Receipt" in YouTube.

replaced & matthewseo thank you so much for this kind of helpful info.

we major problem with YELP..

had like 6-7 good reviews... all fake not filtered..
than we got one bad review and all the good ones got filtered

YELP rep. call us (@ perfect timing) offer us advertizing.

after 45 min on the phone I told 2 go F*** him self

he ask 500 mo. for 6 mo. min = $3000 for YELP advertizing.
but he don't guarantee they will remove the bad reviews.

MOFOs

only thing am sorry about is that i don't have my biz. page screenshot before and after to bad review...

Glad you told them off. Yelp has a bunch of high pressure salesmen trying to persuade people to do impression based advertising typically from a 6 month to a year term. Yelp is even worse than what the yellow pages were. They must have this algorithm where once triggered, Yelp will be much more likely to filter either positive or negative reviews. I've looked at a lot of businesses and it's usually a ton of positive or a ton of negative filtered, but not both equally.

Yelp also has high PR and usually ranks up there in organic results. So if someone does a google search of you and you got bad reviews, you're pretty much screwed. They don't need to click on the Yelp link to find out since google shows the amount of stars that you have right in the search results. If someone types my biz name, right below it is a 1 star from yelp :banghead:

Well if you're charging $600 CPM then you can expect the high pressure sales tactics which haven some of the numbers tossed about regarding Yelp charges.

Yelp has the most annoying sales reps. They won't stop calling after you tell them NO!

Has anyone tried this? http://yelpybot.com/

What many fail to realize about Yelp is how it uses it's review filter to control the flow of business to those that pay for advertising as well...

We own a service based company and Yelp is somewhat new to our area, it started ranking high on the local SERPS maybe two years ago and subsequently people started to participate. One of my customers added me to the site and wrote a 5 star review and soon after I began to see more and more calls coming from Yelp. Before long a sales rep was calling and after a couple months of constant pestering I finally agreed to a 6 month contract. I slowly began to pick up a few reviews here and there but I noticed that they would filter literally half of my reviews, all of them 5 star. At this time I had no negative reviews but I started to realize the reason they were filtering these positive reviews; they were essentially keep me from pulling too far away from the rest of the pack (my competitors on Yelp who hadn't signed an advertising contract yet.) The reason for this is simple; they need a certain percentage of calls going to those new potential paid advertisers and if one business is gobbling up the lion's share of the calls for that particular category then the others will see minimal results from the site and are less likely to buy advertising. It's one layer of control that Yelp can use to manipulate where the calls go.

Here is another layer of control that Yelp uses against it's customers...

About 6 months ago a couple things changed, there were two other companies with paid advertising and suddenly I got a bad review. The review was legitimate, meaning it was a real person but it was his first and only review on the site and it stuck without getting filtered. What this gives Yelp is another layer of control because they can move his 1 star review to the top of the page if I'm getting too many hits or move it to the bottom if I'm getting so few that I'm prepared to pull my advertising dollars.

Unless you own a small business you just don't know the impact a bad review on Yelp can make, it's really sickening that one low life scumbag with nothing better to do with themselves can impact your life and livelihood with a few keystrokes.

True. Now, if someone can find a long-lasting good solution and then monetize it...

Yelp aka scum of the internet. It actually upsets me that they are as popular as they are and can manhandle businesses as much as they want and get away with it. Not only get away with it but profit heavily from it.

Yelp is definitely a gross company. I'd hate to have to deal with them.

Can someone please help me? Yelp has been so unfair and ruine dme. They take off all my postiirve reviews and only show negative ones, and the negative ones are fake. Please can someone help? I know they say its wrong to do this but what else am i supposed to do? THey keep taking off all my postive reviews it is not fair. I don't get as much buisness anymore. Can someone help then here please? I can trade if you don't mind? I hope you don't mind me asking.

Looking to trade or buy review also pm me. as I havnt hit required posts yet to do it.

I will trade Yelp reviews with others that have good profiles. I will trade with you and anyone else here.

localseo510 said:

Yelp has the most annoying sales reps. They won't stop calling after you tell them NO!

Click to expand...

They may be call you to ask if you are interested again... But i m guessing why they dont stop caling you?/

matthewseo said:

If you really examine which reviews stick, you'll see it's mostly based on time. Even reviewers that have made 1 review that are 1-2 years old have reviews that stick. Also if a review gets "Useful" checked by different IP's then the review tends to stick.

Actually most reviews are done by people who just come to make 1 review then leave, never put a picture, never edit their profile. Only those trying to game the system usually want to spend their lives reviewing sites, which is a pretty shameful life.

So here's the tricks I've learned so far:

1) use the same unique/private IP each time you make a review or access the site for each username
2) use your mobile phone to check in after you made the review (one mobile phone per review only)
3) click Useful from various different IP's (different computers and cities) on the review you made
4) don't make the mistake of crossing your IP paths/usernames/emails/profile information

What sucks most is that this is how the Matrix starts and leads to Yelp implants to keep us from "gaming" the system. Pretty f'ed up.

Click to expand...

Wow... thats good ... But its very long process i must say.

Edit: Sorry i had to reply to this post coz i found it so usefull.

god damn yelp n

my latest research shows that yelp doesnt filter based on who is making the review as much as the traffic patterns to the company page, which are harder to fake

all they want from you is more traffic and more reviews because the more you visit their site the more money they make, so they probably set a minimum threshold of traffic to your page before they let a review stick, they also filter by the user but its much more about filtering based on company page traffic.

see my post here:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...o-you-get-yelp-reviews-stick.html#post7268150