Removing Yelp Reviews

So my company has been dealing with fake reviews from competitors in the area, and as we all know in terms of SEO, Yelp has pretty strong authority in terms of Reviews. I was wondering if anyone has figured out a way to remove negative reviews on Yelp?

If you can definitely tell that they're fake reviews, have you tried reporting it or contacting Yelp? I've seen Yelp pages with over 500+ reviews removed because they were not authentic reviews (the shop bribed customers to leave them reviews).

Alternatively, if you could objectively and calmly reply to every negative review, it can actually work out in your benefit since customers like seeing a responsive business owner.

Did you submit the negative review for possible removal?
Did the user violate any Yelp Guidelines and Terms of Service?
If yes, this can be flagged and removed easily.

However, whats the stopping the competition for placing more...

You need to have a plan to always have daily positive reviews coming in for your business to increase rankings and get on top of search engines.

You can try reputation management services or just create strong youtube/facebook etc properties to outrank the yelp reviews disclaiming what was being said

Let us know what the results are...