Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site’s new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.
Do they also notify users that they are the largest score manipulator by far of their data? And that they do so to bully small businesses to pay up or they will ruin them?
So is it any wonder that a business would hire fake reviewers to increase their Yelp score, when Yelp holds these businesses hostage with their outrageous policies for bad reviews? Those reviews can make or break a small business. I’m not exactly sympathetic with hiring fake reviewers, yet I’m not sympathetic AT ALL with Yelp’s business model.
Yelp needs to change how it vets reviews, and have better handling of a business’ response and deletion of irresponsible patron reviews.