Why is Yelp Filtering My Reviews?

Yelp. love it or hate it, it's here to stay.

As of Q1 2018, Yelp had 74 million monthly unique visitors on desktop computers alone. Despite its growing popularity, many small business owners report issues with the review and rating service (namely, the Yelp filter).

Yelp lets consumers (Yelpers) be the jury. Yelp trusts consumers to travel away authentic reviews about their experiences. And with the importance of online reviews, nothing is more frustrating than when Yelp filters a wonderfully legitimate review into the dreaded "not recommended" section.

In this blog post, we'll tell you why Yelp sometimes filters legitimate reviews and provides you some tips for improving the possibilities that your reviews stay recommended.


In episode 1 of Ask Us Anything, marketing experts, Anne and Alex tell you why your Yelp Reviews are getting filtered.
What is the Yelp filter?
Yelp uses an automatic filter to hide certain reviews to display only the foremost helpful and honest reviews. the filter aims to urge obviate fake or illegitimate reviews. The filter is supposed to protect businesses.

But there’s a haul with this. Because the filter is automated, sometimes even authentic reviews get filtered. this is often a drag for business owners, who need the feedback (both positive and negative) from their actual customers.

Positive Yelp reviews can hugely impact small businesses. Seventy-nine percent of consumers trust online reviews the utmost amount as personal recommendations. Businesses can even see a 5-9 percent increase in revenue if their Yelp rating increases by one star (and all those five-star reviews that are being filtered out also don’t count toward your star rating).
Why does Yelp filter your business's legitimate reviews?
When real reviews get filtered, it's frustrating. It’s especially annoying to think that, while your legitimate client reviews are being filtered by Yelp, fake reviews, or even a fake business, can still appear on Yelp.

Kashmir Hill, an editor at Fusion, decided to undertake an experiment to determine if she could trick the online. She created local business listings for a fake karaoke company. She then purchased social media followers and reviews, to make her phony business to look to be real.

Even Yelp, with all its suspicion and scrutiny, allowed her to line up a business listing after verifying the "real existence" of her fake business. And while many of the fake reviews she purchased didn’t make it past Yelp’s filter, others did. isn't the web fun?

Anyway, here are some common reasons why reviews get filtered on Yelp:

Yelp doesn’t trust users who have only written a few reviews, especially if they have no Yelp friends or profile information.
The review is simply too positive or too negative. This also goes for reviewers who only post positive reviews everywhere they're going. I assume Yelp assumes you can’t enjoy every experience.
It isn’t funny or useful. Other Yelp reviewers can mark a review as funny or useful. Reviews that are too short also get filtered. “Great service!” really isn’t helping anyone.
The review violated Yelp’s Content Guidelines, which are pretty straightforward.
The IP is wrong. Yelp uses IP addresses to figure out whether or not a review is fake. So, if a reviewer is on vacation and visits your business but waits until they get home to review it, that review is probably going to get filtered.
The CEO thinks your reviews stink. Okay, that’s probably not a real reason, but he does say so in his Yelp profile.
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Is there a way to figure around the Yelp filter?

While you've no real control over what gets filtered, you'll still do a few things to make sure nothing you're doing causes problems for your Yelp page.
Never pay someone to review your business. That’s illegal, and if you're doing, Yelp will find you which they're going to confirm everyone knows about it.
Don’t offer a promotion to Yelpers in exchange for a review.
Don’t use Yelp as a contest or ad space. I mean, unless you’re paying for Yelp’s slightly shady advertising service. (Yelp has been accused of pushing this service on businesses by threatening to push negative reviews higher on the business’ Yelp page.)
Don’t ask your family and friends to write down reviews for you. they go to identify Grandma’s glowing assessment a mile away.

You can also decide to help legitimate reviews be recognized by Yelp. If you see a review a real customer has written on your Yelp page, but the review is being filtered, you'll add the reviewer as a devotee or vote the review useful, funny, or cool.

And if that doesn’t work, consider finding a solution that works around the Yelp filter. We've developed a review marketing platform called Renown to aggregate all reviews into one place. So, those five-star reviews your clients write won't show au courant Yelp since the reviewer has no Yelp friends, but they go to point out up elsewhere. Click here to hunt out more about Renown.