Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site’s new index documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a five-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.
Yelp used to approach businesses with proposals to to that, yes. Had a friend with a small business years ago and he would get called by Yelp constantly trying to get him to pay to improve his reviews. It’s so shady.
That’s why it’s ironic, for a long time they basically ran a small business extortion arm for any business to consumer business. A family member had the nightmare of dealing with people coming to his house, because that’s what the address was and it sounded like a retail business. The bank brought up his negative yelp reviews and he had to explain how he wasn’t going to pay them $5k to delete reviews that they caused in the first place by missclasifying his business space. No customers were or would ever be served there.
It’s like if you had a family peach canning business that grew really large. You no longer can your awesome peaches there, because you have canning facilities that you work with. But Yelp refuses to delist your business and then you have to fight with them for years about negative reviews of your peach place, that no one has actually been to but somehow has a lot of weird ideas of how to better the experience… And when you fight them they say the only solution is to pay them a fee that they calculated out of their butt to the tune of 1-5k.
Yelp does not do that, those are scammers.