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Confirmed with several restaurant owners, Yelp cold calls businesses often to extort "subscription" charges and if the business refuses the search algorithm dro

Confirmed with several restaurant owners, Yelp cold calls businesses often to extort "subscription" charges and if the business refuses the search algorithm drops their ranking. I've also noticed cases where legit looking reviewers have complained about their positive reviews being removed.

timr 11y ago
You didn't "confirm" this...you're parroting a rumor that originated with a bad East Bay Express article. Yelp doesn't change search rankings based on advertising. Source: I worked there, on search. It isn't true.
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  What is the reason for the huge fluctuation in the search results from one week to the next for something like BBQ? As in one day a restaurant shows up on the first page, and a few days later it was buried 6 pages deep? This observation correlated with the business owners refusing to pay Yelp's cold call sales team has nothing to do with the article you mention. Looking at the search results for pizza sorted by the "best match" algorithm is mind boggling.
  - timr 11y ago
    "This observation correlated with the business owners refusing to pay Yelp's cold call sales team has nothing to do with the article you mention." No, it doesn't. Setting aside the fact that you haven't actually done the analysis (so you couldn't find a correlation if you wanted to), it's an example of "people who want to believe in a conspiracy will find evidence for the conspiracy", with a nice helping of the post-hoc fallacy: Yelp has a huge army of sales people calling businesses every day. Rankings are also updated 24/7. It is inevitable that someone will be called, at random, right before they experience a ranking change. A search as generic as "BBQ" or "pizza" is going to have a lot of variation, because people are constantly using those tokens in reviews, and they match across a huge number of businesses. I very sincerely doubt that there are 6-page differences in a business' ranking on a day-to-day basis, but if it does occur, it has nothing to do with their advertising status.

timr 11y ago

You didn't "confirm" this...you're parroting a rumor that originated with a bad East Bay Express article. Yelp doesn't change search rankings based on advertising. Source: I worked there, on search. It isn't true.

nosuchthing 11y ago
What is the reason for the huge fluctuation in the search results from one week to the next for something like BBQ? As in one day a restaurant shows up on the first page, and a few days later it was buried 6 pages deep? This observation correlated with the business owners refusing to pay Yelp's cold call sales team has nothing to do with the article you mention. Looking at the search results for pizza sorted by the "best match" algorithm is mind boggling.
- timr 11y ago
  "This observation correlated with the business owners refusing to pay Yelp's cold call sales team has nothing to do with the article you mention." No, it doesn't. Setting aside the fact that you haven't actually done the analysis (so you couldn't find a correlation if you wanted to), it's an example of "people who want to believe in a conspiracy will find evidence for the conspiracy", with a nice helping of the post-hoc fallacy: Yelp has a huge army of sales people calling businesses every day. Rankings are also updated 24/7. It is inevitable that someone will be called, at random, right before they experience a ranking change. A search as generic as "BBQ" or "pizza" is going to have a lot of variation, because people are constantly using those tokens in reviews, and they match across a huge number of businesses. I very sincerely doubt that there are 6-page differences in a business' ranking on a day-to-day basis, but if it does occur, it has nothing to do with their advertising status.