In the past 10 years or more consumers have begun to rely upon many different types of review and rating sites to determine whether or not to try goods and services. Often times many people only rely upon ratings and reviews in their purchase decisions.
What consumers do not realize is that companies who sell goods and services understand this and, in many instances, will artificially make sure that their reviews are artificially high whether or not they actually give good service or have good products.
Rating sites such as Yelp rely upon laws which shield them from being sued, in order to basically put anonymous reviews or false reviews from anybody and everyone whether positive or negative.
Company such as Yelp make money by charging companies to advertise on their platform.
My experience with Yelp started innocently enough when somebody wrote a positive review about me. One day just for the heck of it I went on there to see if I was on there, and I was surprised to see that I was. I was even more surprised to see that somebody gave me a positive review. Now granted, I provide excellent customer service to my clients and have been doing so for over 21 years. I believe I go above and beyond the call of duty for my clients. The thing gives me the greatest satisfaction is getting a positive result for my clients. So, the fact that I got a positive review wasn’t what surprised me, what surprised me was that I was on Yelp with a positive review. I did not know that people went on there to review attorneys, there are other sites for that.
I decided to claim my profile. Once I claimed my profile, I got other positive reviews. After I got a few other positive reviews, I got one negative review. The one negative review I got, was from a woman, who after looking at the evidence, and talking with her about her case, I decided not to represent her. Of course, her payback was to write all sorts of false and defamatory things about my law firm.
Somewhere around the same time I got a call from a marketing person from Yelp. She had a strong New York accent, and she was very pushy. She assured me that if I paid a certain amount of money per month, and it was not a small amount, that my ads would show up on Yelp all over the place, and it would lead to more business.
Now I have dealt with hundreds of marketing calls over the last 21+ years of being in business. This was the most uncomfortable pushy marketing call I have ever dealt with in my entire life. This woman was so pushy that it was almost like extortion like you better pay or else type of scenario. I kept telling her let me think about it and every time I tried to get off the phone, she would insist on me going to their sign-up page on the website to put my credit card information in. I finally hung up on her.
Lo and behold, the next time I looked at my Yelp page, the only review that was visible was the one false negative review, and all of the positive reviews were gone and buried at the bottom under not recommended by Yelp. Let me repeat that, because I decided not to pay for their advertising, they buried my positive reviews under not recommended by Yelp and now they are only displaying the one negative review. The one negative review they are showing is from a person with a fake name and has done no other reviews on Yelp, who lives in another state, is not the person who she says she is, and does not live where she says she is. The positive reviews that they are not recommending are from real people I know because they were my clients.
I talked to one of my clients who gave me a positive review, and on their Yelp page it appears to them as though the review is displaying. In other words, Yelp is deceiving them by making them think that their review is displaying, but in reality, to the rest of the world the review is not displaying, because I refused to be extorted into paying for advertising.
I went one step further and googled the term “is Yelp a scam.” I would like for you to also google this term. You will see all sorts of results, and videos of people who also suffered the same thing I have, you will see people on Yelp complaining about the same thing, including reviewers who are upset about having wasted their time writing reviews for nothing.
Yelp is claiming they never actually touch the reviews, they claim they have a computerized algorithm that determines whether or not a review is recommended or not. I say BS. My question is, why would a legitimate review site use any kind of an algorithm to recommend a review? The only legit thing I can think of is to maybe censor cussing or other hate type of speech, but to actually not recommend legitimate reviews is a big scam. In my experience all of my positive reviews went away when I refused to advertise.
So, what does this mean to consumers? In my opinion, if you go to Yelp, most likely what you are seeing, are positive reviews from businesses that are paying Yelp. The businesses that are not paying Yelp, will have all or most of the positive reviews hidden, and will show negative reviews. In my opinion, you cannot trust Yelp as far as you can throw them. Yelp exists not to help consumers, but to make money for Yelp. There are far better sites for consumer reviews.
At least for now in my opinion the best consumer rating site is Google. Google reviews require a user to have an account. You can’t just have some anonymous person throwing up fake information to write a negative review. Yes, somebody could make a fake Google account to write a negative review, but it is much more difficult to spoof Google. Secondly, Google is not penalizing businesses who do not advertise with them by not showing their positive reviews. Even if you do not advertise with Google, if somebody gives you a positive review, it will show up on Google. Yelp on the other hand will just bury it and say it’s not recommended.
Who the hell wants to go to a so-called rating site who censors what reviews you get to read? This is what Yelp is doing. In my case they are not showing my reviews because I am not paying them. They will tell you that their algorithm went through some hokey pokey process and that is why they’re not displaying but they used to be displayed before I decided not to advertise with them.
My wife told me maybe I should pay the extortion money and their reviews will show up again. I told her yeah right, I am going to pay to advertise with a company who is displaying one fake negative review right now? No way in hell are they getting a dime from me until they change their business practices to be ethical. If they stop censoring, and display all reviews, and also stop the practice of anonymous reviewers maybe I will reconsider.
There is another insidious thing happening that you should all be aware of, and that is businesses, and attorneys, putting fake positive reviews out there to bolster their reputation. If it is too good to be true, most likely it is. No company or no thing is perfect. In my experience there is no way to please all of the people all of the time about anything.
What is funny, there is one website in particular, that reviews attorneys. And there is a bunch of attorneys on there that have nothing but positive reviews. There are no attorneys that have 2 stars or 3 stars, they all have five-star reviews. Now you and I both know, that there is no way in hell, that these guys all have perfect reviews. There is one joker on there, that has been in business 5 years, that has 128 all positive reviews. If that is not bullshit, I do not know what is. I would bet if it was legal, $1000, that this cherry has not done 128 cases in his 5 years of practice, let alone getting 128 all five-star positive reviews. What this guy has most likely done, has gone on their and gave himself 128 positive reviews, he learned how to game the system. This is completely unethical, and he could lose his law license for it.
There are services out there that will sell you positive reviews for all the different review sites. Listen, I ordered food from an Indian restaurant that had great reviews, and it was the worst food in history. It took them 2 hours to deliver.
I also have watched movies that had great reviews, and it was the worst shit stinker in history.
Reviews are just like anything else, you will not know for sure unless you try it yourself. You have no clue if they’re real or not and you can’t really trust them unless you try yourself.
Now I have gone on Amazon and purchased products, and I have read the reviews there. There sometimes are negative reviews with negative commentary, but it was just because the idiot didn’t know what they were doing with the product.
Trust me when I say you do not want to live your life based upon what everybody else tells you to do and that goes for reviews. In my experience reviews have been wrong most of the time.
Getting back to Yelp, now you know, Yelp is a scam, Google it. On Yelp the positive reviews are being shown from companies who advertise on Yelp. The ones that do not advertise, are having their reviews buried.
Now with respect to my business, for over 21 years I have provided legal services to well over a thousand clients in the state of California. If I did not provide excellent services to my customers, I would be out of business. I let that speak for itself. Caveat Emptor!
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