Posting a Positive Review on Yelp? Not Unless You Haven’t Posted Numerous Other Times Before

A few weeks ago, we blogged here about how some businesses may pay customers to remove negative reviews from sites such as TripAdvisor.

The blog raised the question of just how reliable online reviews are given this practice and, potentially, the business itself (or friends/family) posting numerous positive reviews, thus making for an entirely fake overall review.

Here’s a twist on that: Yelp will actually remove posts without notifying either the reviewed business or the review poster if the latter has not posted enough other reviews on Yelp.  Of course, Yelp decides just how many other reviews are “enough.”

This happened recently to my husband, who is an extremely busy IT professional, but who nevertheless got such a good experience from a small local business that he took the time to post a for him rare review of the business with pictures of the product we had bought.  A few days later, the business owner contacted him to ask why he had taken the review down again.  He had not, but Yelp had for the above reason.

Of course, Yelp probably wants to avoid the occasional rage posting or an overly rosy review.  However, the above practice seems unethical and unreasonable.  Review sites will by nature have both good and bad reviews.  Yelp has chosen to believe that if a person only posts one thing, it must by definition by unreliable as being too far on either end of the spectrum.  However, the truth of the matter is that a lot of busy professionals do not have the time for or interest in posting a large amount of reviews.  That, of course, does not make an occasional review unreliable, perhaps quite the opposite: if you don’t post a lot of views, the ones you do must reflect truly good or bad experiences. 

Not only does Yelp waste reviewer’s time like this, but it does not even explain this policy on its guidelines section of its website.

A healthy dose of skepticism towards review websites seems warranted, which probably does not surprise too many of us.