I was looking for chimney sweeps in the DC area and found one of the top-rated chimney sweeps on Yelp on about page 4 or 5 after the 2 and 1.5 star rated compan

I was looking for chimney sweeps in the DC area and found one of the top-rated chimney sweeps on Yelp on about page 4 or 5 after the 2 and 1.5 star rated companies. The companies on the first page were all those that paid Yelp. I talked to the owner of the company that I hired and he said that Yelp wanted him to pay $300+ / mo to get his placement on the search pages higher and he said he didn't want to because he was so busy from so much work he didn't need any more visibility (he ran and operated it with maybe one or two other assistants). For a lot of companies, this could be viewed as extortion to hide well-rated companies so far down the list that most users wouldn't look to go there. Yelp definitely hides a lot of reviews that are completely legitimate supposedly due to their review validity system filtering them, but in a lot of cases I've seen the only crime these disenfranchised reviewers had was that they didn't want to go make a full-blown Yelp profile with pictures and everything to make really serious, very well described complaints. This artificially inflates review relevancy ratings for companies that have Yelp reviewers that skew towards younger demographics. There's a ton of stores where I live that are frequented primarily by 50+ year olds but they have almost zero Yelp presence since nobody operating or visiting the store are much into technology / social media enough to care.