Anonymous wrote:If you are the business, Yelp will remove bad reviews if you pay them. My husband's business got a bad review from a seriously crazy lady. They constantly send him emails saying if he pays them, they will remove the bad review. He refuses to pay their "extortion" money. Businesses can pay their monthly fee, and they will censor the reviews.
Anonymous wrote:Are you a new Yelp user? Do you have a profile pic up? Yelp often censors new "orangehead" users, until they rack up a small history of reviews (to prevent people from spamming a business either positively or negatively)
Anonymous wrote:Amazon does the same thing. I'd just finished grad school and was eager to read something for fun. I like sci fi/fantasy and based on overwhelming reviews, I got this series called Ruin Mist. The first book was edited really poorly (lots of misspellings or words used incorrectly - like 'beared' instead of 'bared'). I gave the second book in the series a shot only to discover 3/4s of it was a repeat of the first book. Not just re-hashing or reviewing, it was VERBATIM. I was so pissed I contacted Amazon. They refunded not just the purchase cost but also shipping. I then wrote reviews of the two books. Nothing I wrote was incorrect, inflammatory or insulting. It was fact based yet, my reviews were removed because "someone" complained I had violated the terms of feedback policy. I later learned the author, Robert Stanek, was notorious for writing his own positive reviews and getting negative reviews squashed http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/book-promotion/ethical-self-promotion/ . What an asshole.
Anonymous wrote:OP - did you notice in small print after the string of standard "yelp" reviews there there is a small notice for those that have been removed for contend. If you hit that button and prove you are human being not a computer, then you can read all the other posts that had been dismissed by Yelp as either being too positive (as in hired by a company to write these things); to negative; foul language; sexistm etc.). I ALWAYS read the removed reviews. Sometimes I get better information from those than from the posts left in ploace.