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Comments (5)
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Save/ShareA handful of business owners recently filed a class-action lawsuit against user-review site Yelp. The companies accuse the site of offering to remove negative reviews for advertising fees. In a statement, Yelp denied the allegations.
Yesterday, Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman blogged that the charges are "beyond ludicrous" conspiracy theories.
Rumors of pay-for play have dodged the site for more than a year now. One possible reason: Say a restaurant owner asks its patrons to write positive reviews on the site by sending out an e-mail to loyal customers. Dozens of customers might post positive reviews based on genuine experiences within a day of receiving the e-mail. But Yelp's computers are set up to detect any blast of positive reviews and to treat those reviews as likely spam, meaning that it sometimes accidentally deletes those accurate reviews. Business owners may feel that Yelp is working them over as a result.
I guess a court will decide whether the lawsuit, which says that a Yelp salesperson explicitly pushed an advertising deal on a business owner with a promise to push bad reviews out of sight.
MORE
The court filing against Yelp (opens as a PDF)
Site with more info on the class-action lawsuit
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I am a former Yelp member (I left because of unfair treatment), and BEFORE I left, a local business owner told me that they did to her what was described in this article. This was before this story broke. She just asked me if that was standard practice for them because she felt bullied by them.
We'll see if a court sees it that way.....
Posted By JM on March 2, 2010, 6:40 PM
I'm a big Yelp fan (and not an attorney), but it sounds like that complaint is valid.
Posted By Zach Everson on March 3, 2010, 1:44 PM
I have heard nothing but awful things about yelp, so I just avoid the site altogether and recommend that everyone else just avoid it as well. Seems like just another greedy, unscrupulous internet scam artist to me.
Posted By corky on March 4, 2010, 6:18 PM
What is the big deal? Yelp is not the end-all of user reveiw sites. I've been to the site; the majority of posters are idiots anyway.
Posted By Jerry Cicerone on March 13, 2010, 8:10 PM
I wonder about people who blanketly call other users "a bunch of idiots." Sounds a bit holier than thou.
With that said, I was using Yelp here and there and I hope it gets resolved amicably. I hope Yelp continues to exist. Guess I must be "one of those idiots."
Posted By Anastasia Ellis on March 17, 2010, 11:38 AM