Yelp Reviews
If you're a small business especially in the hospitality or service industry then you know the importance of good Yelp reviews for your business. Yelp has become a cultural phenomenon that gives your consumers a voice and now even offers Yelp rewards in order to compete with Foursquare. That being said good Yelp reviews equals good search results on their site. Well that or just forking out the cash for a sponsored ad on their site, which always shows up at the top. Now that the importance of Yelp reviews has been stressed, let's take a look at a recent lawsuit over Yelp reviews, in which the small business plaintiffs claimed that Yelp was extorting their businesses offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for money. Was this a legitimate claim against Yelp or completely ludicrous?
Yelp Reviews | The Case
This case was brought to court over a year ago in February 2010, and the plaintiffs included a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA amongst others. However the judge dismissed the case against Yelp reviews and gave the plaintiffs the option of refiling the lawsuit within a month, which they did. So what exactly was the veterinary's claim against the Yelp reviews?
...a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California — claimed that Yelp’s sales team said it would remove a “false and defamatory review” only if the vet bought advertising at about $300 per month.
Now offering higher ranking search results for a small business isn't anything new, Google offers advertising on high ranking sites for payment, and just like Yelp it will let the user know that its an ad placement. However strong-arm small business bullying such as this is completely unethical, if in fact the Yelp sales team were treating positive Yelp reviews as commodity.
Yelp Reviews | The Ruling
Well apparently there just wasn't enough to convince the judge that their was any foul-play as far as the Yelp reviews go, so the judge once again dismissed the case. What's Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman have to say about it?
While we were confident that Yelp would ultimately prevail because we knew the allegations were false, it is helpful to have the matter resolved early so we can put these allegations behind us.
http://searchengineland.com/judge-throws-out-class-action-lawsuit-against-yelp-98574
Its one matter to allow businesses to pay for front page Yelp reviews, but to delete bad Yelp reviews for money? Thats complete fabrication of popular opinion of popular opinion and this kind of news will cause reviewers to think twice about posting to the site. Although Yelp beat the case, SearchEngineLand writer, Matt McGee, found evidence of more foul-play in his research:
This isn’t the first time Yelp has been hit with accusations of wrongdoing. (And may not be the last.) From reading numerous articles over the years, anecdotal evidence suggests that Yelp’s sales staff can be overly aggressive in courting small business owners, while also unable to explain to small business owners why certain reviews remain on their Yelp business listing and others are filtered out — not a good combination for communicating with many SMBs. Adding to the confusion was that Yelp used to offer advertisers the ability to promote positive reviews on their profile pages — a feature that Yelp finally killed in April 2010, just a couple months after this class action lawsuit was originally filed.
Yelp Reviews | Online Directories
Whatever the truth may be in the Yelp reviews case, the importance of listing your business in online directories such as Yelp and claiming these pages is extremely important in improving your online presence and SEO, if you don't have the time to do this, we can help!
No comments:
Post a Comment