Yelp! Reviews Disappear?

[melissa r]

I've had a handful of reviews go up on Yelp! recently and then all of a sudden **poof!** they disappear. Yelp! says that they have a filter (like an email spam filter) that can lead to reviews never making it online. However, I saw the reviews! I was notified they were there, I thanked the client and then a month later, they disappear!

Interestingly, while I was looking at my profile, I noticed a sponsored link for another local LMP on my page! So I contacted Yelp! but they just repeated what I'd already found on the website.

Do you think Yelp! could decrease or increase a business's reviews based on the level of your membership? I am really confused and very reluctant now to ask for reviews if they just disappear!

Any ideas???

 

[pretty woman]

Yelp reviews disappear after a while if the user has made too few reviews... especially if yours is the only review they've written. You can Google about this. Yelp values reviews from Yelp users, i.e. people who write more than a couple reviews, more than someone who just came on once at a business owner's request and never came back.

You just have to let clients know about this so that they don't waste their time only reviewing you and then having their review disappear. They just need to make some reviews of other businesses, and the they're set.

On the other hand, I have seen disappeared Yelp reviews come back. Weird.

And I too have wondered how much Yelp itself is manipulating the search results, etc... I've tried looking for information on this and have come up short in the past. But I would not put it past them them at all.

 

[Christie]

Hmm. Never heard of Yelp before this thread. Weird stuff like this is generally a sign of poor site management. At the very least, administrators should be able to provide some clarity regarding what's up with the disappearing/reappearing reviews.

 

[DeepThrust]

Yelp! is marketing itself as a 'trendier' Citysearch. It is very popular here in Seattle and so I've been putting efforts into it. However, I won't be continuing so as I feel that the website administrators are manipulating reviews.

Thanks for the input, Ego!

 

[loves james]

Think what you will about their practices, but here in the Bay Area Yelp is considered to be not something one can ignore.

Of course, my experience has not shown that to be the case But we'll see. My goal is 20 great Yelp reviews, and then I'll stop thinking about it for a while.

 

[syahir sephiroth]

Yelp! Reviews Disappear?

I had a yelp.com review disappear, as well. I notified the client who wrote it, and he just needed to re-confirm his email address and it reappeared like magic.