I remember a few months ago visiting a taco place in Hawaii that I discovered on my Yelp iPhone app. It was relatively new, highly-rated and virtually impossible to find — tucked back into a corner in a strip mall. But the place was buzzing with customers. I asked the owner, how much business can he attribute to Yelp? More than half of it, he said.
With power like that, Yelp is a natural target for local businesses who are concerned a few bad ratings can lead to a big drop in business. Many have accused Yelp of tweaking reviews for its advertisers, a claim Yelp has consistently denied. But Yelp allowed advertisers to pin an existing review, called the “favorite review,” to the top of the review list.
Yelp announced today in a blog post that it has discontinued this practice because “it led some people to the wrong conclusions about whether businesses could control the review content on their page.”
Yelp is also changing its approach to its “review filter,” explained here in an animated video. This has been the source of much confusion, because Yelp doesn’t display all the reviews for a business — just the most credible ones. And these reviews can change from time to time as user credibility scores change, which again, led some people to believe Yelp is manipulating reviews behind the scenes. Now, Yelp is allowing users to see reviews that didn’t make the cut, along with an explanation why.
“Lifting the veil on our review filter and doing away with favorite review will make it even clearer that displayed reviews on Yelp are completely independent of advertising — or any sort of manipulation,” explains CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in the Yelp blog.
Only time will tell how the business community responds to the changes.
