[Kique]

The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system.

If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking. Once I starting paying they're typically hidden. Now if you manually go and and sort by Date they will still be there, they're not deleted and my star rating doesn't change - so I guess you're technically right that I don't get better ratings. I do think that most people don't realize that the most recent bad reviews aren't necessarily as visible though if you advertise with Yelp.

[tyingq]

Is the extortion scheme as simple as that? Paying businesses get "Yelp Sort", non-payers get "Default Sort"?

If so, that answers a lot of questions.

[InitialLastName]

That's not far off of how (Yelp's partner) Grubhub operates, where the default sort for restaurants is in descending order of the cut they give Grubhub.

[ViViDboarder]

No. I believe every page defaults to the same sort.

[Dylan16807]

They default to the "same" sort, but that sort acts differently depending on whether you've given Yelp money.

[ilikehurdles]

From my experience, the reviews filtered out are often reviews by folks with small or no networks. I saw my wife's reviews filtered out when she first had an account, before she added friends or connected the account to facebook (not sure which one did it, this was years and years ago). I'm not saying this is a good system, just my observation of one factor.

[Kique]

Yea I'm sure brand new users have lesser ranking on Yelp Sort. My experience is just from talking to the Yelp Account Managers and seeing our bad reviews be Page 1 one month, and pushed to a further page the next month.