yelp hides my reviews because I won't buy their advertising!
I have 11 reviews and only 2 are showing!
Please sign this petition to ban yelp on Google and all search engines
until they stop filtering legitimate positive reviews and stop allowing false reviews to appear on business listings.
Yelp doesn't show all the reviews (good or bad) that the business gets. In my case, 10 out of 11 reviews are hidden from the first page of my yelp business page.
The link above is where you can find my primary yelp review for my business, JCA Elite Scuba. I've been in business since around October of 2013 although I've been teaching since 2008 and diving since 2006. Scuba is fun! It is also incredibly rewarding to see someone do something they never have before. When they get it, a world opens up to them that still many can never appreciate. With that said, when one of these people go out of their way to write a review and then an "algorythm" decides that it doesn't meet preconceived notions of quality, character, content, or even legitimacy, then it really is the machine writing the review.
Yelp states, "We get millions of reviews from our users, so we use automated software to recommend the ones that are most helpful for the Yelp community. The software looks at dozens of different signals, including various measures of quality, reliability, and activity on Yelp. The process has nothing to do with whether a business advertises on Yelp or not. The reviews that currently don't make the cut are listed below and are not factored into this business's overall star rating."
The reality of this is that the software was written by people as were the reviews. A software engineer can never be impartial unless they are writing a random number generator program. Even then, when the software is an industry "trade secret," a level of personal bias cannot be disproved. There are other entities that collect customer's reviews of their experiences without "sanitizing" them before revealing them to the public for their safety.
Anyway, here is what I've got hidden in the section called, "Reviews for JCA Elite Scuba that are not currently recommended." They follow with, "Note: The reviews below are not factored into the business's overall star rating," however that doesn't make me feel any better about having the reviews hidden from the general public.
This is NOT an isolated incident either. If you look at the search results on Google for "why yelp hides positive reviews" you'll see hundreds of testimonies to this fact.
It's the same on YouTube. Search YouTube for, "why yelp hides positive reviews". I strongly caution using yelp and paying for advertising on yelp! It will affect your business.
