yelp needs help

It seems as though dandelions are part of the every day business at Yelp. A San Fran local paper, East Bay Express, recently uncovered some of Yelp's dirty sales tactics, like writing bad reviews of local businesses that declined to advertise on the website. Rascals. Looks like Yelp needs help.

Apparently, the bullying has been going on for months. According to several business owners in the local East Bay area, negative reviews of their businesses appeared and positive ones disappeared after they turned down an aggressive sales pitch. The practice is so straight out of the Godfather playbook it's pathetic. Of course Yelp denies any such doings, but the allegations are challenged by nine business owners and a former Yelp employee.

While Yelp says that it doesn't move reviews around, it does employ "scouts" or "ambassadors" to write reviews of local businesses. And this seems to be standard practice. According to the story, "Tens of thousands of newspapers, magazines, and online destinations write reviews of businesses even as their advertising departments are busy soliciting those same businesses for advertising. Ideally there is no causal relationship between the two. Financial considerations shouldn't affect the tone of supposedly independent content."

Right, but Yelp is not a newspaper or a magazine and is positioned on "Real People, Real Reviews." So, although writing reviews may seem right for Yelp, it also contradicts the notion of user-generated content. Plus, according to Yelp, they don't post every review. According to their FAQ page, "Yelp has a system which automatically determines which reviews show for a given business."

I am a Yelp user - actually more like spectator - so it's pretty disappointing to know that there are lots of little dandelions floating around the site. Although the practice of local businesses asking friends to write reviews has been around since Citysearch days, I never thought that this time the culprit would be Yelp itself.