Yelp Cracks Down on Review Solicitation

I’m really not sure about Yelp’s hardline stance on review solicitation.

I think it runs the risk of causing honest operators to sink down the Yelp listings, wile letting the spammers surf the line between right and wrong.

If you are a local business soliciting Yelp reviews, you’d better be aware of this development.

Read more in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates w/e 10th November 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #Reviews #Yelp #FakeReviews #LocalSearch

Key Issues Summary:

• Yelp is taking a much tougher approach to local businesses which solicit reviews.
• Soliciting reviews could result in penalties being applied to the company’s listings in Yelp’s results.
• In extreme cases, this could lead to a Consumer Alert being flagged against the company’s listings.

Key Actions To Take:

1. Don’t solicit review for Yelp.
2. If you are soliciting reviews for Yelp, stop it.
3. Watch out for competitors soliciting reviews on your behalf (I wouldn’t put it past them).
4. If you do get penalised, work with Yelp to remove the listings penalty, although this can be a frustrating process.
5. Click here to contact me to discuss how to gain reviews from customers to promote your local business.

Insights & Discussion:

Gosh. Yelp is going against review solicitation in a big way, and it’s a bit of a struggle to understand why they are quite so against it. Their review solicitation policies are draconian.

The only rationale that works is that it is too difficult for them to judge grades of solicitation, so a blanket ban is the only answer.

Most other platforms encourage their local business users to seek reviews from customers, but that is mainly because those platforms do not have the inherent base of users and reviews that Yelp has – and the fact that Yelp converts better than Facebook or Google.

Generally, reviews are a good thing. There are significant issues with fake reviews, that if the companies involved put their minds to it could be solved. However, they know that calling a review fake when it isn’t would be worse for their business model than listing a fake review in the first place, so they don’t bother to do much about it. Frankly, with the resources at their disposal, that’s a cop out.

Businesses get very frustrated with some reviews and their inability to effect change. The user is always right, rather than the business.

More Information:

• H/T SE Land
• Yelp’s Draconian Review Solicitation Guidelines

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We recently released the super-exciting The State of SEO in mid-2017. Read it now.

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• Yelp is cracking down on review solicitation.
• Fake reviews are as bad as fake news.
• Watch out for Negative Fake Review Solicitation.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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