| I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months. It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate. The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account. Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate. The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added. Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone. |
Anyway Yelp overall business practices and customer/business support is flaky at best, and a scam at worst. "freedom of speech" has not the same meaning when you are at Yelp.