Likeable Content Daily

by Devin Sugameli

Update: Yelp’s Business Outreach Manager Luther Lowe linked us to a full response by Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman that does a very good job of addressing the claims discussed below. Thanks for the link, Luther!

Last week, a veterinary clinic called Cats and Dogs in Long Beach, CA filed a class action lawsuit against popular social networking and review website Yelp, alleging that Yelp acted in violation of California’s business code. According to Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital owner Gregory Perrault, it was immediately after two particularly unsavory reviews had been posted about the clinic that Yelp sales representatives began contacting him with “frequent, high-pressure calls…[promising] to manipulate Cats and Dogs’ Yelp.com listing page in exchange for Cats and Dogs purchasing an advertising subscription.” His claims are in essence the same as those presented in Kathleen Richards’s infamous East Bay Express article posted around the same time last year, which accused Yelp sales representatives of partaking in an extortion scheme aimed at procuring advertising dollars in exchange for burying poor reviews on the business’s Yelp page.

In response to these allegations, a Yelp representative gave the following statement:

Yelp provides a valuable service to millions of consumers and businesses based on our trusted content. The allegations are demonstrably false, since many businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. These businesses realize that both kinds of feedback provide authenticity and value. Running a good business is hard; filing a lawsuit is easy. While we haven’t seen the suit in question, we will dispute it aggressively.

At the least, this response is a bit more on point than the fairly weak defense Yelp’s CEO posted on the company’s blog last year, which denies any truth to these allegations in one sentence and then dedicates many more to discrediting the author and her sources. But this defense fails to acknowledge the crux of Perrault’s accusation: that a Yelp sales representative offered not to remove, but bury negative reviews so that they appear lower on the business’s page. Yelp already offers advertising businesses to highlight their favorite review at the top of their profile, and these reviews are clearly marked as “sponsor favorites” – so what’s so different about moving their least favorite review to the bottom?

The biggest difference is that numerous accounts have accused Yelp of doing just this – and if they are, then they’re lying about it. It may be true that Yelp representatives are not offering to delete negative reviews outright. To be completely fair, if Yelp representatives have been offering to simply alter the physical placement of negative reviews on a business profile, we can assume that the business’s overall star rating as well as its ratings trends and distribution charts would be entirely unaffected. All this being said, as a frequent Yelp user myself, I know that no matter a business’s overall rating I will always look carefully through the first full page of reviews and pay special attention to poor ratings. Two “A-OK” 3-star ratings plus one terrible 1-star ratings on the front page makes a much bigger impact than just two mediocre 3-star ratings alone.

Were Yelp not presented as a network essentially by and for the customers, it might not be very alarming to hear that a local business could chose to manipulate the order of review postings to its advantage. But a motto like “Real people. Real reviews.” doesn’t imply any participation on the proprietor’s part. Whether or not the alleged practice is actually in violation of California’s business code, if proven true, Yelp’s activities are deceptive at the least. What are your thoughts? If true, would this practice be easier to swallow were its existence made explicit to Yelp users, or should it be banned outright? Tell us what you think in the comments!