Yelp.com cracks down on fake reviews

Yelp cracks down on businesses that pay for good reviews

Yelp recently set up a sting operation, and nine businesses were caught trying to buy fake reviews. That’s a miniscule fraction of the total number of businesses reviewed on Yelp, but it’s a good start to set an example. Here’s what happened to those nine:

On Thursday, warning signs began popping up when users tried to access the pages of some businesses with five-star ratings. To read on, users must click a button that says, "Show me the reviews."

"We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business," the red-bordered alert box says. "We weren't fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only hurts consumers, but also honest businesses who play by the rules. Check out the evidence here."

The box will stay up for three months as punishment.

More punitive action mentioned by the LA Times:

Yelp also said it will start informing visitors when a business has a slew of reviews posted from the same computer – often a red flag for inauthentic reviews.

Another article: Buy Reviews on Yelp, Get Black Mark

Yelp has more than 30 million reviews. For every five new notices that are submitted, one is determined by internal filters to be so dubious — either highly favorable or highly critical — that it is banned to a secondary page, which few users bother with, instead of appearing on the business’s profile page. Many of the reviews tagged as fake are written by people new to Yelp.

Yelp likes reviews written by people who have submitted a lot of reviews - the so-called “Elite” reviewers. This is similar to the tags that HW gives customers based on their number of reviews, like novice nomad, avid traveler, or globetrotter. But Yelp actually gives more weight to the reviews submitted by frequent reviewers. A good idea, in my opinion.

Yelp hosts reviews of tons of businesses in tons of different industries, unlike our booking sites that are hostel specific or TripAdvisor that is travel specific. As a result, I wonder if they will become the leader in taking action against fake reviewers and dishonest companies. Perhaps they can come up with some new solutions that will set the standard for other review sites.