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Yelp sucks big time


By David Grant - Posted on 17 February 2011

Update: Yelp has now un-filtered all my reviews.

Yelp sucks so much. I created 5 reviews on Yelp and each one of them has been filtered. The first review I created was a 1 star review for Crocodile Baby, a baby store with some of the worst customer service I have seen in many years (an opinion that is shared by several of our friends as well). The review was terse and to the point, and I suspect I've been black-listed ever since then. Their automated system that checks for spam is supposed to be aggressive and have some false positives but 5/5 of my reviews being essentially marked as spam is ridiculous.

ANNOUNCEMENT: 

We have recently implemented a system to outsmart yelp from hiding our filtered reviews:

Step 1- first of all, if you’re advertising with yelp, we suggest that you stop doing so and shift that money to optimize your own web site instead

Step 2- Have a graphic designer make a yelp badge that is placed on your web site. It should say “we have …… filtered and unfiltered reviews on yelp”. 

Step 3- when a visitor clicks on the badge, it will go to another page ON YOUR OWN WEB SITE (instead of going to yelp’s. (why help them get traffic and rank higher anyways)? 

Step 4- On this page have your graphic designer get a screen capture (picture) of all your filtered and unfiltered reviews and have them pasted together onto one page.

Now, all your reviews (filtered or not) will be visible to all your web site visitors. 

5- put a note on the top that says, “for your convenience we have placed all our filtered and unfiltered reviews on one page to see. If you’d like to go to our live yelp page, click here …………”

Make the whole page clickable to your live yelp page  so no-one will think you’re trying to hide something or trying to be dishonest 

Advantages of doing this: 

1- Your visitors will stay on your web site instead of being directed to yelp’s

2- Your  visitor can’t click on your competitors 

3- No more being a slave to yelp’s algorithm

4- Yelp would not benefit from getting traffic from you and higher rankings on google 

5- This project cost us less than $150 to implement 

Just be sure to shift that $300 per month on yelp advertising and put it into KEYWORDS that people will search for. 

Please pass this along 

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