How do you get rid of bad reviews on Yelp?

Can't be done, don't buy the BS.

Pay Yelp

In addition to that...
There was a WSO going around called Yelp Filter Loophole or something like
that. Whether it works or not is a different question.

I think the best that you can hope for is adding more views inturn pushing the bad review down.

Dealing with Yelp is like beating your head against a wall. Repeatedly.

They filter for whatever reason. If an account has made too many reviews at one time, they may remove all or just some of those reviews. If a business receives too many reviews at one time (of course, it's Yelp's definition of what "too many" actually means), then they will remove all the reviews. (For instance, a business is doing some sort of promo and invites people to leave reviews on Yelp).

I have heard that if you pay them for their so-called services then they are more willing to bend their own rules on the filtering. Not sure how accurate that is though.

There isn't a way to remove bad/negative reviews on Yelp, so you shouldn't be worrying about that as much as your client's LEGIT reviews getting filtered.

I'm actually getting ready to release a WSO on MY findings and what has worked well for ME and MY clients with regards to avoiding Yelp's filter. And no, this doesn't involve paying Yelp in any way, shape, or form...or writing fake reviews.

Feel free to send me a PM if you're interested and I'll notify you when it's ready for launch.

One of my competitors gives his clients a $20 panera gift card to leave a review on yelp. He's got like 36 reviews so far lol.

Another thing I will say about this guy. My brother sells jobs for him and another business owner who are in competition with each other. But the business owners are friends, and both have good relationships with my brother. So he sells for both.

Long story short is this. One of the businesses has 36 reviews on yelp, the other has only 5. He has told me time and time again, he is able to close jobs much easier, and for a higher price, with the business that has 36 reviews. There have been times he's walked in to sell the job, and been out in only 30 minutes with the contract signed (this is for large home improvement jobs).

He always asks afterwards, "why did you decide to choose us over our competitors"? And like clockwork, they always say "because of your reviews on yelp".

I don't honestly think it matters where the reviews are. But having lots of good reviews anywhere, makes a HUGE difference as far as sales go. Absolutely, undeniably, without a doubt. So you know what the other business owner started doing now? He gives away $20 gift cards to TGI fridays lol. Its funny because they're in competition, but they both know everything that each other does. The more successful business owner told the less successful one about 2 years ago, that he was incentivizing clients with gift cards for reviews. His reply was "I'll just ask them instead". Implying that gift cards weren't a big deal and the incentive wasn't important. Well, there is good reason the more successful guy makes $300,000 a year more than he does. Because he's not a cheap dipshit.

I'm sure most of you know how much reviews help, but seeing it from this perspective has really opened my mind to how important your online reputation is.

-Red

Give yelp money and they will help.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, they are nothing but scammers! They manipulate the reviews so that they can get money out of business owners.

This is my theory....

They remove positive reviews and leave bad ones up. This will get business owners calling yelp to find out what is going on (talk about inbound leads!). Once they have them on the phone they say that if you buy advertising everything will magically be fixed (which many times it's not). They want you to sign a contract and pay hundreds per month, if you don't they ruin your credibility.

Let's assume that they use an algorithm. If so, use common understanding to figure out how they probably wrote it.

First, you probably don't want reviews that are five stars, at least when starting out to counteract the bad reviews. That means they should be no more than four stars. Also, encourage customers to not give five star reviews and explain why.

Secondly, take a look at how they are written. Studies have been made to show how real reviews are written as opposed to fake reviews are written.

Third, don't have reviews posted in a short time frame. Make it random as possible.

Fourth, it will be better if the reviews come from the same geographical area as the business in question.

Fifth, reviews should not be entered from the same IP address.

Sixth, the first review of the reviewer should not be five stars no matter what business they are first review was made for. On average, I bet that most people are more likely to give a bad review than give a good review in the beginning.


BTW...don't take these suggestions as being tried and proven. I simply wrote these as suggestions off the top of my head. They have not been tested on my account in any way. However, I think using common sense makes a lot of sense in this respect as in many others.

Edit: after finally finishing this post, I saw redshifted's post... I agree with him about developing the account before making a review for said business. That makes sense also. Note:It looks like I copied his opinion about using common sense but I did not..just slow in typing.

interesting thread ...and yep Yelp does filter the reviews and then offers to remove the 'filter' when advertising is initiated for about 300 a month. so what I did was set up some blogger blogs titled "business name reviews" and a dot com with the same title...and collected all the good reviews from online review sites, with proper credit given, post those on the blogs and the site inlcuding a video I made for the company, got some views to the video, wrote a press release about the NEW ands IMproved line of products they offer , and took about a week to get it ranked ABOVE the other review sites...worked like a charm...try that instead of trying to beat yelp at their own game.