I've actually heard from other business owners also threatened by Yelp salespeople after not accepting their offer to increase ratings. Except, in the cases I'v

I've actually heard from other business owners also threatened by Yelp salespeople after not accepting their offer to increase ratings. Except, in the cases I've heard, the Yelp salesperson actually implicitly threatened a decrease in ratings if the business did not buy ads. Regardless of whether these salespeople have the power to do so or not, it's not entirely ethical business practice. And this leads to business owners unaware of the review filtering algorithm who have encountered these shady salespeople to try to find correlation between the two and end up pointing fingers at Yelp. So I wouldn't say Yelp is free of blame in these situations, they should be more readily firing these salespeople and shouldn't have a culture that encourages their salespeople to act this way.