I’m working with a local optometric office to help with basic SEO and social media. Yelp is a big deal in reaching potential new patients. To that end, we put links to the office’s social media profiles, including the Yelp profile, in the doctor’s email signature and on his website. We also displayed the signage Yelp itself sent to the office. We also sent an email to the patient database pointing them to the office’s social media pages, including the Yelp profile.

It worked. People noticed, clicked, “Liked,” followed, and reviewed the office. Yelp has filtered ALL of the reviews people posted, has filtered all subsequent reviews since this effort began, and has even filtered out reviews that have been on the profile for over a year.

All inquiries have resulted in a canned response and a link to their site describing their filtering algorithm.

Because new reviews are being filtered almost immediately and the old reviews were inexplicably removed, I get the feeling there is more to this filter than the algorithm seeing too many reviews come in a cluster (as happened when we began these efforts and sent that email).

Any ideas? Anyone had any success getting Yelp to reinstate legit reviews (which these are)?

@amyhallbiz Thank you for your response and thoughts on this.

No, the account is not paid. The optometrist is not seeking preferential treatment, just not inexplicably negative treatment.

There are, as I type, 31 reviews filtered out from the account and only 4 displayed. 3 are positive and 1 is very negative. We don’t want the negative review filtered out. We want legitimate reviews put back in.

Except for the day the email went out (when a number of people posted reviews on one day), the reviews are posted about one every couple days. They are not clustered, they are NOT solicited by the optometrist or anyone in the office. It’s just that the Yelp link, along with the Facebook & YouTube links for the office, are included on printed materials, follow-up emails and signage.

It would be unfortunate if small businesses would have to become paid Yelp accounts in order to stop their legitimate reviews, good or bad, from being removed from the site. Similarly unfortunate if paid accounts get their bad reviews removed.

@robpeck Great suggestion. Done and done.

@abigailgorton it seems you are right.

BTW, responses on the Yelp “Talk” thread started about this have concluded that the Yelp algorithm likely filters out first-time reviews and reviews by people with no friends on Yelp.

Why would anyone create a Yelp account to write a first review if it is destined to be removed? It stinks from a reviewer perspective as well (and there are threads about that as well).

I spoke with Yelp on a client’s behalf. If they even think you are asking people to post on their site, they punish you. Whether you ask them to just post what they think or say what you tell them, they frown on this. They say they want Yelpers to become your customers not the other way around. Pretty stupid idea I think.

Also, their advertising plan is awful. They create a nice video for you and then charge you $350 per month with a 12 month contract ($1000 cancellation penalty). You get a few nice things on your page such as no competitors ads and others but you only get 500 ads monthly. This is not based on clicks but impressions.

Bad deal in my opinion.

@tracourt my guess is Yelp thinks my client has been asking for positive reviews. In fact, all he’s been doing are the things they suggest – putting code they provide on his website, posting signage they sent, etc. If my client is now being punished for this for my asking questions about this, there is nothing to do but wait it out.

The more I learn about the paid advertising the more I know I could never recommend it to a client. They base pricing on impressions (!!) not clicks and provide no stats to even track a delivered CPM. And while it removes a competitor’s ad from your profile (but that apparently depends on how much you spend), it doesn’t remove the “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed…” section. Doesn’t seem worth the expense.