Yelp, please explain to a small business owner running a small restaurant in a small town how it’s possible to have 29 great filtered reviews.
I co-own a small 36 seat restaurant with a beer & wine license in Burlington, Vermont. All was great, until a while back, I received a phone call, wanting me to advertise on Yelp.
Being a small local business, I didn’t want to spend the money on a website, but to have the money go into my neighborhood in the forms of locally sourced advertising. A couple of weeks later, the Yelp “filter” started to filter our great reviews. It’s gotten to the point of beyond ridiculous.
We have 36 reviews, all but 3 are great on yelp. 29 are filtered, but I can’t understand why or how.
Let’s look into this, I said to my business partner.
Of our reviews, maybe it’s because some of the members have only reviewed us. I set out to ask the people who are our routine guests, to review other places they go to. Hey yelp, you are welcome for the extra page views and revenue that generates by way of advertising.
After a couple of weeks, we started to notice that the guests reviews of our place remained filtered, but that the new places they reviewed were not filtered. Odd.
So maybe it was time of year, we thought. We’ve done “review pushes” throughout the year, to get more reviews. That doesn’t seem to matter.
One of the reviews was written by the chair of a local political party. Find your facts Yelp, fix your filter. It’s flawed!
Odd Yelp, Odd. I won’t advertise with you, but play fair. Stop trying to extort money from small business, in order to show people what is truly being said about them.