SEO Blog > With the Help of Yelp you can Put a Black Hat on your Internet Marketing

With the Help of Yelp you can Put a Black Hat on your Internet Marketing

Posted • February 19, 2009 • Comments Off

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yelp blackhat With the Help of Yelp you can Put a Black Hat on your Internet Marketing Do you use Yelp?

Is Yelp offering Black Hat Marketing?

Yelp is being accused of black hat marketing.

In a recent article in the East Bay Express Kathleen Richards had an article about how Yelp was offering to remove or “hide” your not so favorable reviews for only $299 per month.

Yelp is denying the accusations but Kathleen’s article seems to holding water.

Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0

Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site … for a price.

“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”

This wasn’t your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John’s restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: “We can move them. Well, for $299 a month.”

In fact, something seemed shady about the state of his restaurant’s negative reviews. “When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved,” John said. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top.”

During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise.

This is being reported in the bay area at this time but reports of such tactics have surfaced many times before.

Yelp CEO Geoff Donaker is quoted as saying “advertisers and sales representatives don’t have the ability to move or remove negative reviews.”

His denials are being challenged by nine local bay area business owners and one former contract employee from Yelp’s early days.

Several Yelp sales reps after being given anonymity are quoted as saying they promised to move reviews to get businesses to advertise. “It’s not illegal or unethical, We’re just helping the little guy. It doesn’t hurt them, it benefits them.”

If this isn’t black hat internet marketing I will eat my white hat.