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Yelp Bows To Cries Of Foul Play

Following claims of extortion and resulting lawsuits, Yelp will no longer sell businesses the opportunity to prominently position positive reviews.

"Three suits filed this year allege that Yelp pressured businesses to advertise and retaliated against companies that didn't by negatively skewing their ratings," explains The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog. "The conduct is an offer to manipulate content in exchange for payment," said Jared Beck, a lawyer representing one of the plaintiffs, in a Journal story last month.

Notes Search Engine Land: "The connection between reviews and advertising is what seemed to cause much of confusion and misunderstanding among small business owners."



Going forward, the popular local business-review site will also now let users see reviews that have been removed by its "review filter," which is designed to help prevent business owners from posting malicious reviews of competitors or glowing reviews of their own company. And while Yelp denies the allegations, the fact that its system of operations sparked such controversy seems problem enough for many industry watchers.

"With words like 'extortion' being thrown around and a slew of new location-based services cropping up, Yelp had to become more transparent," writes Mashable. Problem is, "By making all filtered reviews so easily accessible, there is also a risk that [Yelp's] secret sauce becomes a bit more apparent (and hence, easier to game)."



In a blog post, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman even conceded that the "favorite review" feature "led some people to the wrong conclusions."



Says The New York Times' Bits blog, "Some of the features that confuse and irritate businesses will remain." It's talking about Yelp's spam filter, which, according to Stoppelman, "will continue to sometimes remove legitimate reviews, for example, "Yelp will continue to rank reviews according to a secret formula that takes into account not just the date but metrics like how prolific a reviewer is."



According to GigaOm, Yelp also plans to form a Small Business Advisory Council, "and it has already incorporated feedback from meetings with business owners, such as including advertiser videos on their profile pages (a feature that also launched today)."

Read the whole story at Search Engine Land »

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