Tag Archives: yelp filter

The Yelp review filter was a feature that was baked into Yelp since the beginning, but has only become more developed over the years. After a brief history of why the filter is needed, we’ll dive into an explanation of how it works and what your business can do to avoid having your positive reviews disappear.

The History of the Review

From the beginning, Yelp understood that its value would diminish rapidly if the site was unable to create a mechanism that identified fake reviews and disposed of them. In the beginning of the site’s lifespan, this filter was very rudimentary. Those rules weren’t very advanced and caught a lot of false positives, filtering real reviews as fakes.

Over time, Yelp devoted more resources to strengthening this tool.

SEOs and marketing managers have also developed a basic understanding of how it works. At the least, there are some hard and fast rules to follow if you don’t want your business’ reviews to get caught in the filter:

• Users who review should have more than one review to their name.
• Reviewers should have developed profiles that express the user’s interests, potentially show a photo and have a realistic-looking bio for that user. Check-ins help with verification of a user’s locale, ensuring that location-based reviews are filtered accordingly.
• Reviews should refrain from slanting too far one way or another. No one has the most incredible service they’ve ever had outside of a handful of examples. This rule is perhaps the hardest to quantify.

User Behavior

Yelp understands how its users think, which plays a role in the kinds of reviews the site chooses to display. Yelp knows, for example, that users are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one.

With that in mind, businesses should take a few distinct steps to improve the quality of reviews they receive. First, don’t be shy! Reach out to the reviewer. If the review is positive, consider becoming that user’s friend on Yelp. Vote the review useful, and encourage others to do the same.

If you’re reviewing, make sure your profile has a picture associated with it. You should also reach out to other users and make friends. If possible, vote their reviews funny or useful. Then begin writing your own reviews. With luck and time, your work will be accepted by Yelp as legitimate.

In Summary

The filter that Yelp employs to remove faked reviews has all the right intentions, but it still leads to false positives. If your business is seeing positive reviews disappear, take a look at the profiles for the users that left those reviews. Look for some of the “fake” attributes and encourage your authentic customers to leave reviews on your page.

Some businesses even look to reputation management firms to help with this outreach and engagement. You might contract these companies to help create an email list, or design a campaign to aggregate positive reviews and testimonials. If you can’t use them for Yelp, you can still list them on your website.

Every business owner with a Yelp listing has had to face this frustration at some point in their career: bad Yelp reviews. No one likes to hear others complain about them, especially if those reviews are false. Yelp has a system to filter those reviews and ensure an honest review system. Unfortunately, the system frequently catches positive reviews that look fairly legitimate.

If this is happening to you now, don’t pull out all your hair just yet. We’ll look at why this happens and what you can do about it.

How the Filter Works

The filter runs on a complicated algorithm that is designed to catch fraudulent reviewers by establishing a series of “rules” that help Yelp’s systems identify a user. Yelp might look for a user’s profile picture, the number of reviews she has left, or inspect the text of the review itself to determine whether the viewpoint is slanted too far one way or the other.

The filter is designed to look at factors such as these to determine whether a review, or the reviewer, is faked.

How You Can Help

You might feel helpless, but there are a great deal of things you can do to help your positive reviews avoid the filter. First and foremost: prepare to get social! You’ll need to maintain a strong presence on Yelp. That means writing to reviewers who leave both negative and positive reviews, and somehow avoiding conflict while you do this.

Try to be fair and approach every complaint as legitimate. Offer a clear solution to resolution and offer to take the conversation private to close the deal. Once the customer leaves, hopefully satisfied, ask for his or her opinion on Yelp. Even if they update the review with an edit, it still makes your business look better.

Engage your customers in store as well. If you find that your page is seeing a lot of filtered positive reviews, provide instructions on how customers can complete their Yelp profile and make themselves into legitimate reviewers. You might have a “Did You Know” type sign in your business, or include this information as part of sales brochures or menus.

Do Not Dos

One thing that you should definitely not do is solicit positive reviews. Yelp has actually become quite sophisticated when it comes to finding businesses who engage in this practice. They conducted a sting operation recently to catch people in the act of paying for fake Yelp reviews. The sting resulted in several businesses receiving a visible banner that ratted them out for having paid for Yelp reviews.

Even if you attempt to game the system by thoroughly learning and testing these rules, odds are that you’re throwing money and effort at the wrong problem. The few positive reviews you’ll get will be offset by the effort it took to get them.

Final Thoughts

If you feel the need to improve your reviews, one of your best courses of action is to hire some kind of reputation management or branding firm. They can help you control your presence in the search engine, improve your standing and address negative reviews.