What can I do to push Yelp off the 1st page?

Links on pages with pagerank, so that kind of excludes all links that can be build in an automated way, except for blog comments but they hardly do any good for rankings.

So what you need are real high PR links, you can either buy them or setup a network of your own. Proper link building never comes cheap unfortunately.

Others would call what you try to do "reputation management", Google around and you'll see that most companies charge $2500+ for that, obvious it doesn't have to be that expensive, but in case you have to push it to page 2 you need to rank 10 properties, not trying to self promote but if you had to outsource that to someone like me you would probably spend like $800,-, as that's quite an amount you can also use that money to build your own small private network of sites and use it to rank other sites as well.

Its very safe. For a few reasons.

1) They used aged accounts. Accounts they've had for long before you decide to actually use them.

2) You have an option to select local ips or nonlocal. So the reviews look like they're coming from your area.

3) They consider the time of your locality, so they're not posting reviews at 3am in the morning, which will obviously look shady.

Most importantly, if you're scared, you can start slow like I did. You can also choose not to drip feed them and do them in random spurts like I do. I never do 1 consistent review on the same place everyday. I mix them up, and do them as random as possible.

As far as the "legitimacy" of it. I don't see anything illegal or illegitimate about posting customers real reviews online. Thats how they advertise their service. We have a huge binder of real customer testimonials, that I've always wanted to get online, which is why I started using them.

However, I decided to mix them in with my own, very naturally written reviews, so I can stretch them a bit longer. About 75% of mine are real reviews that were emailed from customers. Which originally did so we can print them, put them in our binders, and take with us on leads. Then 25% just to stretch them. The interesting thing is, some of the fake ones look more real than the real ones. Because I always take a good 20-30 mins just to do 1 of them.

What I also noticed, is people I haven't even asked to leave reviews, are now leaving great reviews. I think its a conformity type of thing. But your niche may be different. I'm sure it is since we rarely have any dissatisifed customers.

Also, lets put it this way. You can try it for just 1 month. Considering that your listing is already destroyed, I can't really see how you'd wind up in a worse situation. My suggestion would be don't post all glowing reviews.

Do 1 - 5 star, 1 - 3 star, 1 - 5 star, 1 - 4 star, 1 - 3 star, 1 - 5 star etc etc.

I think it would look weird to go from all bad reviews, to all good review too quickly. But that still happens in the real world when new management takes over a company so I still don't think it would set off any flags.

ps. I truely believe it would be the smartest thing you can do. You can stop once your star ratings gets up to 3.5-4, then figure out a way to stop getting so many bad reviews. In the end, if you can't stop that from happening, I wouldn't even bother trying to dilute them. Because it sounds like you have a much more serious problem. I understand your niche is prone to this, but seriously, business is business. You shouldn't have that many pissed off customers regardless of the industry. There are a couple businesses in my industry that have nothing but horrible reviews online, and I know it has nothing to do with the niche I'm in, but how they run their companies. They're greedy, they lie, they try to force people into crap they don't need/want to do. One of my competitors has had the cops called on him twice just for being an asshole in peoples homes (imagine having reviews like this online lol).

I'm not implying this is how your company is run, but how hard can it be to satsify your customers? Find what the most common issues/complaints are, then just restructure your business so they don't happen.

I think this method is being done on a large scale. Find someone who specializes in doing this and you should be fine.

How do the reviews for your main competitors look? Do you get any sense they're being manipulated?

Changing the Yelp page seems a WHOLE lot easier than changing 10 Google SERPS.

If you are a larger company then surely you can afford to hire someone who specializes in SEO, "review diversification," and / or reputation management to clean this up for you.

Why is everyone so cheap especially when it comes to something so important like your company's reputation?

The top reputation management companies out there charge multiple thousands of dollars per month for their services.

I'm sure you can find some people here that would charge less.

I also agree that trying to get a page penalized on such a high authority site could have the opposite effect that you are going for but if the guy who suggested it can provide proof and a detailed formula then it would definitely be worth attempting.

(Proof that he has specifically penalized a YELP page (recently) that was ranking for a term.)

Telling someone to go buy spam links off fiverr is anything but a defined strategy.

Link building is NOT as simple as buying high PR links for social media pages.

The devil is always in the details.

Elementary school scientific method applies to everything.

Hypothesis
Variables
Process
Observation
Results
Replication
Theory
Law

Garbage SEOs throw mud against the wall and guess what parts are sticking.

Real SEOs throw each grain of sand against the wall in a precise order and test the results over and over and over until they have defined all the variables that matter so they can replicate the process. Then they test the process repeatedly. Then they sell their knowledge in the form of services. Knowledge has value. People should be willing to pay for it and even more for execution.