Our review of Yelp is bad as our experience with Yelp has not been a good one the last couple months. You would think that a company created as a portal in which people give their honest reviews would be a cinch to get good reviews right? That would make common sense, after all, they collect reviews for a living. Well, that hasn’t been the case at all, at least not for us. Yelp does not get a good review from us. We would give them one star.
About Us
First and foremost, we run an honest business. We stay away from any bait and switch schemes, lowball estimates and any other shenanigans regularly perpetuated against clients by other unscrupulous and deceitful moving companies in the industry. There are a few bad apples in this business; we’ll admit that much for sure, but we don’t belong bunched together with those bad guys at all.
Our business philosophy has always been to meet the needs of our clients as best as we possibly can while balancing the requirements and profitability of our company. More often than not, our clients are repeat customers and that says quite a lot about us.
About reviews
Reviews are like a double edged sword. On the one hand, they are an excellent tool for customers who want to use the reviews as part of their selection process. On the other hand, reviews can be an awful weapon that terrible people use to say dreadful things in reviews that may not be true. Yes, some people just make stuff up.
Our review of Yelp
The most unsettling part of the Yelp review procedure is Yelp’s supposed algorithm that allegedly filters out what it considers being untrustworthy or suspicious reviews. Herein lies our main gripe with Yelp. We are expected to trust this algorithm even when it filters legitimate reviews.
As we stated earlier we have gotten some positive reviews, and our assessments had apparently passed the sniff test, or to put it more precisely, our reviews did past the Yelp algorithm sniff test.
They were up on the Yelp website and listed as regular reviews for months.
That is until we were contacted by Yelps advertising team. We were asked, prodded, harassed and bothered about advertising on Yelp by their sales teams. They emailed us. They called us. They emailed us again. We thought about it, and we almost pulled the trigger on placing ads but eventually we decided not to advertise on Yelp.
What happened after we notified Yelp about our decision seemed very suspicious.
Right after declining to advertise on Yelp, our reviews were all of a sudden rejected by the so-called algorithm after having been accepted and displayed on the website for months. The reviews simply disappeared. Yelp stripped our profile of most of our reviews and placed them in a “not recommended” section. Our clients can still see our good reviews but they’d have to click A “see all reviews” but first.
Now we’re not making the accusation that maybe Yelp employees manually stripped our profile of most of our reviews and placed them in the “not recommended” section as a punishment for not placing advertisements on the site, but it sure did look that way.
Check out this videos we found on YouTube. First, a professional chef describes how he is convinced that Yelp is manipulating reviews.
As Chef Marcus Guiliano so eloquently explains, Yelp does a lot of things that are suspicious, to say the least.
We found the next YouTube video posted by the Washington Post back in 2013 that describes Yelps unfair practices:
Overall, our experience dealing with Yelp has left a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. We think the whole idea the whole website is crap, and we do not ask our clients to leave reviews on Yelp nor do we ask our customers to read or look for our reviews on Yelp. We are happy an A+ rated business with the Better Business Bureau. The BBB is a real unbiased entity that can be trusted.
If you have any questions, please contact us at 347-308-6290.
