[istjohn]

And yet no one can produce any evidence. It's just an easy excuse for a manager or owner whose location is getting poor ratings. My personal experience is that Yelp has an agressive sales force, their fraud detection system seems to fairly frequently raise false positives, but a business can do great on Yelp without paying a penny if they have happy customers.

[acdha]

My point was that it was widespread. There are so many small businesses that you don’t need that high a percentage to have bad experiences with sales critters or be conspiracy minded for a lot of people to hear the claim.