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So sales reps say that your good reviews will stay and your bad reviews will disappear, but what they say is untrue?

I don't know about the Thai restaurant owner, but I certainly trust JWZ. http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/02/yelp-shakedown/

OK, you trust JWZ, but did you read what he wrote, or did you just glance at it and make a snap judgment because you think he's cool? Here's what he says in easy-to-consume bullet points for the TL;DR set:

1) The linked post is four years old. Yelp used to sell a "featured review", but hasn't done that for years because it was controversial (duh). So that part is true, but no longer relevant [1].

2) Stupid people with bad taste write Yelp reviews. This is definitely true (hello, internet), but again, irrelevant [2].

3) He links to the tired old East Bay Express article that started the whole "Yelp extortion" meme, and which has been definitively debunked. Repeatedly [3].

So, fine. Trust JWZ. He's a good, smart guy. But in this case, you're "trusting" a mix of his opinion (which is valid), and out-dated, second-hand information (which is not).

[1] http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/yelp-kills-featured-reviews/...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEdXhH97Z7E

[3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020450530457700...

So.... you're saying that it's a bad idea to trust what people say about businesses on the internet, because it's often outdated and lacking detail?

What does Yelp do again? I forget.

It's bad to indiscriminately trust what completely random people say. That's different from not trusting at all. There's a reason why Yelp displays friends' reviews before other random reviews, and why Yelp goes to significant effort to get people to write textual reviews rather than just leaving a star rating.

Trust him about what? That article says: - He's "pretty sure" (direct quote) that they offered to take down reviews. Hardly a smoking gun. - He doesn't agree with the reviews of his business. No surprises there. - There's an article in a newspaper where a bunch of business owners claimed Yelp punished them for not advertising. - I think he even implies that Yelp's PR people being scared about that article is somehow evidence of it being true...which is borderline funny.

I trust my heroes too, but like, that blog post doesn't really...say anything.

A little off-topic, but this remark by JWZ is funny:

> I can't stand Yelp. Mostly because it's always the top hit when I search for a restaurant instead of that restaurant's own web site, which is useless, but also because I wouldn't trust any of its reviews for a second.

Yelp's SERP ranking is actually their best feature...because they at least have the important facts of the store (its phone number, address, category, etc) in a predictable, usually parseable format. JWZ's post is from four years ago, which means that many more restaurants were using Flash (many of them still do now)...Yelp's listings overtaking those was a welcome phenomenon for me

I've actually heard from other business owners also threatened by Yelp salespeople after not accepting their offer to increase ratings. Except, in the cases I've heard, the Yelp salesperson actually implicitly threatened a decrease in ratings if the business did not buy ads.

Regardless of whether these salespeople have the power to do so or not, it's not entirely ethical business practice. And this leads to business owners unaware of the review filtering algorithm who have encountered these shady salespeople to try to find correlation between the two and end up pointing fingers at Yelp.

So I wouldn't say Yelp is free of blame in these situations, they should be more readily firing these salespeople and shouldn't have a culture that encourages their salespeople to act this way.

You can't just brush off sales reps claiming to be able to improve reviews. If Yelp isn't paying them enough and getting crap, that's Yelp's fault. If Yelp has out-sourced his to someone else, they have out-sourced their reputation.[1]

[1] http://www.popehat.com/2011/12/27/outsource-your-marketing-o...

Yelp's cold-calling operation is in-house.

It's naive to think that you can control what a team of thousands of sales people say while dialing for dollars. No matter what you do to control the script, there's going to be someone who breaks ranks to gain advantage.

It's naive to think that you won't be help accountable for what the people you pay to represent you are saying, too.

I agree with most of what you say, but this is vastly overstated: "There are tens of thousands of businesses being called by Yelp sales reps every day."

If they call 30K businesses a day, they would call every single business in the US in 3 years.

http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html

Considering that they're trying to sell to every business in the US, 3 years actually seems like a very long time.

They are not trying to sell to every business in America. Do you think all businesses are restaurants and barber shops?

Do you think yelp reviews are only for restaurants and barber shops?

My business makes apps. Is Yelp going to call me soon?

I use to be an account exec at Yelp, we had a goal of calling 300 businesses per day. I don't know how big the sales team is now, but we had a class of 30. And there would be a new class every month. And that was just in the SF office. They have a whole sales team in AZ and NY. 30k doesn't seem far fetched.

If they called one business every 10 minutes, they would need 625 full time employees to pull that off. What kind of business has 625 employees? And why are they only averaging one call every 10 minutes? Impossible, I say:)

Yelp is an extortion racket.

This is a recurring story that does not go away. Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action.

Further, I judge people by their actions, not their intent. "Oh, you didn't mean to shoot me in the face? No problem!"

My two heresy anecdotes...

My buddy has a restaurant. He's always playing cat and mouse with the Yelp reviews. He claims Yelp buries the positive reviews and that he's been told they would reorder the reviews, for a price.

More worrisome is my doctor's story. I checked my doctor's Yelp review. Doctor is trashed. Which surprised me, because this doctor is great. So I ask about it. Doctor claims reviewer was a disgruntled patient looking for pain medication for migraines, which is something this doctor (a neurologist) does not do. So doctor contacts Yelp. Sorry, sir, there's nothing we can do. Perhaps you'd like to buy some advertising, we can adjust the results.

Straight up extortion.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

What level of proof do you require?

Something more reliable than hearing "from a totally trusted individual, why would they lie?"

People repeat untrue things a million times a day for varied reasons. In this case, people who don't read up on Yelp's FAQs are frustrated by the yelp filter on both a consumer and business-level and want to subvert them, so they regurgitate a story they heard from someone else as fact.

An email or bill for review promotion/deletion services rendered would be perfectly acceptable, otherwise less credulous persons will file them away with the rest of the bitter cranks.

I'm on the other side of the fence. Walks like a duck and all that.

Without checks and balances and transparency, it's easier to assume the fix is in. The mere appearance of a conflict of interest is sufficient to signify a conflict of interest.

Credulous, huh? That's a good one.

"The mere appearance of a conflict of interest is sufficient to signify a conflict of interest."

And what gives there a conflict of interest? The algorithm has absolutely nothing to do with what advertising businesses pay for or do not pay for. This much is known.

Yelp is not Consumer Reports.

Yelp, Google, UrbanSpoon, YellowPages all charge for placement. And that's fine. But the veneer of collaborative filtering is a con. It's no different than the industry standard quid pro quo system of reviews for ads in tech / product magazines.

Yelp's claim to some form of algorithm objectivity doesn't change the power dynamic.

In other words, I don't credulously believe there to be a functioning Chinese firewall separating the business functions within Yelp. Because those firewalls rarely work, if ever.

But hey, to each their own.

"This is a recurring story that does not go away."

Same with any of the urban legends on Snopes.

I infer from your comments that there would be no way to prove based on review display that Yelp was providing review relief if you pay for advertising, right? You basically have to trust their algo?

The algorithm isn't published, but you can click "filtered reviews" on the bottom of the page and eyeball them yourself / decide for yourself

Which last I looked was super hidden and required a captcha to even read.

The CAPTCHA is probably to prevent people from scraping unfiltered reviews and using unfiltered reviews to attempt to reverse engineer the algorithm.

To your first question - By all means, you could prove it. Establish relationships with and systematically monitor the displayed and filtered reviews of a statistically significant sample of businesses. Record when they are contacted by Yelp sales reps, record their decisions on those calls, and classify their filtered review behavior before and after. This is doable, and it would be enough information to determine if there is actually a correlation in review filter activity to advertising offers.

Go for it. As a former Yelp engineer, I can assure you that the answer would be negative (no correlation), but I invite you to give it a shot.

To your second question, the answer is "yes". A spam fighter simply cannot publicly release their spam detection algorithm - it would make the system too easy to bypass. SEO black hats have been trying for a decade to get around Google's sorting algorithms, and then they cry foul when Google changes things up. The message from Google all along has been: Stop trying to game our system, and instead focus on creating good websites. Yelp's situation is no different.

2 other data points from (disclosure) someone with ties to Yelp:

1. Ongoing independent research / A working HBS paper found no connection between advertising and filtering (see last page of: http://hvrd.me/ZNpuOy) [Why do we see advertisers are more likely to have their positive reviews filtered?]

2. A simple Google test like this: http://bit.ly/15QV1WS [Why are these advertisers not using their 'Delete negative review' button? Hint: because it doesn't exist. Which begs question -- If it doesn't exist, is there a rational incentive to sell it?]