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Our First Great Review on Yelp is Now a Not So Good Filtered Review.

But I guess we understand after reading and watching Yelp’s explanation of their customer rating process. It turns out a lot of businesses write their own reviews under multiple fake accounts, or actually hire people to outsource all their reviews for a few bucks. This not only happens on Yelp, but on sites like citysearch, yellowpages, and even google. The benefits of this are enormous. Better reviews lead to more customers (until they actually go to the place) and a higher page ranking in search engines. Of course there is always a downside to not playing fair.

Looking at our first review on Yelp I can understand why Yelp’s community editors might have thought the review was not fully legit. The following are observations I made about the review itself:

The reviewer has no profile picture.

The account looks brand new.

This is the reviewer’s one and only review.

The review is glowing with praise and is five stars. (we hope this isn’t a red flag, because we’re going for this every time)

I guess if I were an editor I would see those things as suspicious as well, but the truth is that this was a real customer. We have documentation of the spray tan session, but the point isn’t to prove she is a real person. Our main concern is that a customer took the time out of their day to create an account on Yelp and write a review about us and now it’s just kind of being dismissed as irrelevant. We always hope for positive feedback, but never ask or expect a review from our busy clients, so it was a nice surprise at the time.

I use Yelp myself and I sometimes rely on other people’s honest review of a business to help me find what I’m looking for. Everyone wants to know a review can be trusted and that it is real including myself, and I appreciate that Yelp is trying to be as fair as possible to businesses. But what about when a real review gets flagged as being fake as it is in our case? Take a look at our post about the first Yelp review we got a while back, we were really excited! And now the review doesn’t even count towards our rating. As a small business we work really hard everyday to get that kind of positive feedback from our customers and we’re still proud of it, even if it is now a filtered review.