Unfortunately, Reviews on Yelp Cannot Be Relied Upon for Vetting Purposes.

This is what Judge Peter Doft had to say:
Peter Doft, characterized Yelp's actions as “the modern day version of the Mafia going to stores and saying ‘You wanna not be bothered … you wanna not have incidents in your store? Pay us protection money’.”
Source:http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Yelp-Methods-Practices-Garner-Negative-Reviews-208758251.html#ixzz3GFQKAgFO

Fremont Laser Med Spa:

We have 500+ 5 star reviews on Google, Yellow Pages, Merchant Circle, Bing, Yahoo etc. Yelp has mixed us with some other business and constantly filters our positives reviews but negative reviews are kept on the top .These negatives are not from our customers since these names are not in our system.

Yelp continues to call our business trying to extort us for advertising dollars. They call, solicit us, and when we decline, they tarnish our small business’ image on their website.

From now on, I will log their call as a complaint. They want businesses to advertise with them. They recently again sent us a contract for $500 a month for advertising with them asserting that if we sign up with them for the above amount we will start to have a higher ranking than our competition.

Their sales rep repeated that to us that over time things will improve if we become more interactive with our clients. (YELPS contract can be shown to anyone who requests us to see a copy)

This kind of blackmail is really not a healthy way to conduct business. We have put together from Google search some actual links for your satisfaction to see what YELP is doing below. We want to remain positive and hopeful that they will change their evil ways of doing business.

Federal trade commission has received over 2300 complaints against Yelp’s extortion activities and has launched an investigation. Please click on the following links to self-analyze:

FEDERAL TRADE COMMITION ON WALL STREET JOURNAL--2300 complaints to FDC BY SMALL BUSINESS AGAINST YELP:
These “extortion” claims again resurfaced in two articles published this week. One in the Wall Street Journal, focused on a lawsuit brought by Hadeed Carpet in Virginia over anonymous, critical reviews on Yelp. The business owner claims that the reviewers were not actual customers and sued to get their identities. http://marketingland.com/ftc-discloses-small-business-complaints-yelp-79113

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