Ask HN: Yelp has blocked 90% (n20) of our legit 5 star reviews. What do we do?

4 points by wittedhaddock 5 years ago | 2 comments

Hi HN,

We are a small business primarily serving seniors. Yelp has chosen to show a 1 star review and a 5 star review, for a total of 2.5-3 star average. This hurts our prospects greatly, as a customer-service oriented business who competes with major US telecom carriers.

Many of our seniors have created Yelp accounts for the first time in order to give us reviews. We have been in touch with ~6 different representatives at Yelp over the past year about this issue, and none will ever say anything beyond "the algorithm decides which reviews appear."

Does anyone else here have any recommendations for other methods we might try to get Yelp to display our customer reviews, particularly if these group of customers is the least likely to have a Yelp account? As a telecom provider, trust really really matters, and Yelp's decision to hide genuine customer reviews hurts our business.

Link: https://www.yelp.com/biz/community-phone-company-cambridge-3

Thank you HN for any feedback you can provide

dfraser992 5 years ago |

I did my MSc these in ML on classifying fake reviews, using the text for features. So I know something of the field and how non-text features (like the age of an account and the rating etc) can be used. The details of Yelp's algorithm are not well understood by researchers, but it certainly emphasizes account specific information because that is the core 'philosophy' of Yelp versus something like Amazon.

I'm not surprised Yelp wasn't interested in helping, you have a common complaint that they would naturally ignore in the interests of not helping actual fraudsters and people trying to get an edge up on the competition. And Yelp doesn't much care especially if you're not making them money re: all the businesses that have sued Yelp.

The first idea that comes to mind is to not be reliant on Yelp and tend to other sources of reviews like real-life Word Of Mouth marketing, e.g. ask your customers to help recommend your business to others they know. People will find that sort of review far more reliable than something on a website left by anonymous strangers. And what other communication mediums (like Facebook or Instagram) might your customer base use?

The other is if they are providing all 4 and 5 star reviews, then the algorithm will find it awfully suspicious all these reviews from first timers are so positive. That is a classic sign of someone trying to game the system. Tell them to leave 3.5 and slowly get the understanding of "Yelp" incrementally higher over time? Or get your customers to leave more reviews for more businesses and so their accounts are regarded are more reliable - only then do they review your business.

I realize these ideas are not instantaneous solutions and require asking your customers for help, but ... given what I know of review sites and the utter lack of any real effort on the part of Yelp/Amazon/TripAdvisor/etc to really deal with the problem of fake reviews and/or the problem of false positives like you're having, I really don't see any magical technical solution. You can't really influence Yelp very well, so what are the other parts of the equation that you can influence?

bilbopotter 5 years ago |

The dreaded algorithm. Sorry to hear this.