AndFinally

Anyone else on here use Yelp to review things?

markonline1

Yep

scrubbedexpat091

No.

sir_eccles

As with any review they need to be taken with a pinch of salt. A rather unsettling development with yelp is when people walk into a place mouthing off about being a yelper and they deserve whatever or else.

username.exe

Yes but I've found it a bit hit-and-miss.

I've found some great little places that I probably would have not bothered with because of Yelp (and managed to avoid some that I would have gone into otherwise)... but I've also eaten in some absolutely terrible gaffs that had stellar reviews.

In fact, the last place we went out to we did so on the strength of the Yelp reviews for the establishment... it was so bad (ridiculously greasy, poor quality ingredients and glacial-like service) that we simply haven't eaten out since. (Good for the pocket book and the gut). How they got 265 reviews at a 4 star average... I'll never fathom.

Here's their Yelp page.

Michael

I'm not sure what that will do since Yelp has a secrete algorithm to determine which reviews to post. I've only ever written 3 Yelp reviews, 2 positive and 1 negative and none got posted. The positive reviews were for good honest small companies with few reviews posted, didn't advertise with Yelp, and had a 1 or 2 star Yelp rating. The negative review had hundreds of positive reviews posted, advertised with Yelp, had a 5 star Yelp rating, was displayed at the top when searching for that type of business, and from every indication was a con business.

I suspect if the positive reviews were negative and visa/versa, they would all have been posted.

sir_eccles

It isn't much of a secret. The business can pay yelp to remove reviews. Or rather yelp demands money from businesses to remove reviews.

Bob

I use it to see if there's any new places to eat in a area, but the reviews themselves, pinch of salt. They're mostly rubbish.

GeoffM

It's like Angie's List - money determines a review's status/visibility/ranking.

The most accurate I've found are TripAdvisor - not perfect but at least somebody has to approve the reviews before they go live, and the reviews tend to be more descriptive than the usual "it's crap" you get on a lot of other sites.

Michael

Or the Better Business Bureau.

Better Business Bureau: The Best Ratings Money Can Buy - ABC News

scrubbedexpat091

As far as I know Trip advisor doesn't remove valid reviews either they do let the companies respond with their side of the story however if the company so chooses.

I think they also have a min. character requirement in the review and a basic it sucks won't get through.

AdobePinon

In my experience, Trip Advisor is the worst for manipulating reviews and rankings. I keep an eye on the listings for a few local good and bad restaurants I'm familiar with, just to see how these websites are rating things. The turds get polished frequently. Less so with Yelp - the biggest problem I find there is a lack of reviews.

thinbrit

That is BS. We used to run a fairly small ($450 a month) advertising campaign for our business. We got one negative review, from someone who admitted they hadn't even used our business, and Yelp refused to remove it. I dropped the campaign immediately. We only had 20 reviews, all were previously 4 or 5 stars, but this new 1 star review would show at the top of the listing.
You cannot pay Yelp to remove a bad review, period.

thinbrit

At least Yelp provide a mechanism to respond to the review, although I doubt many people go diving in to the reviews of a poorly rated business to view the business owners rebuttal. Google reviews provide no such mechanism.

We had to reinforce the view to all our staff that the customer, or even when they are not a customer, is always right. Bad reviews really damage a business, and this whole new generation of Millennials with a feeling of entitlement, and eager to lambast your business if they don't get what they want, can dent in an instant what you spent years building.

BubbleChog

I am an Elite Yelper, though that's likely to lapse this year and friends with a lot of other elites and have never gone in anywhere mouthing off about it. Because I know a lot of the other yelpers I know which reviewers I trust
I very rarely give 1 or 5 star reviews. Somewhere has to be REALLY bad or absolutely amazing. Most places are average and it's dull writing middling reviews.
I will also discount 1 and 5 star reviews from people with no other reviews or just a couple of reviews.