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

Yelp lets consumers (Yelpers) be the jury. Yelp trusts customers to leave authentic reviews about their experiences. With the significance of online reviews, nothing is more frustrating than when Yelp filters a totally legitimate review to the dreaded”not recommended” section.
In this blog post we will tell you why Yelp occasionally filters valid reviews and give you some tips for improving the chances that your reviews remain recommended.

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What is the Yelp filter?

Yelp uses an automated filter to conceal certain reviews in order to display only the very helpful and honest reviews. The objective of the filter is to eliminate fake or untrue reviews. The filter is intended to protect businesses.
But there’s a problem with this. Since the filter is automatic, occasionally even authentic reviews get filtered. This is an issue for business owners, who want the feedback (both positive and negative) from their actual clients.

Favorable Yelp reviews can affect small businesses in a massive way. Seventy-nine percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Businesses can even see a 5-9 percentage increase in earnings if their Yelp score increases by a single star (and those five-star testimonials which are being filtered out also do not count toward your star rating).

Why does Yelp filter your business’s legitimate testimonials?

When real reviews become filtered, it’s frustrating. It’s especially annoying to think that, while your legitimate customer reviews are being filtered by Yelp, fake reviews, or even an entirely fake business, can still appear on Yelp.
Kashmir Hill, an editor in Fusion, decided to try an experiment to determine if she could trick the Internet. She created neighborhood business listings for a fake karaoke business. She then paid for social media followers and reviews, in order to make her phony business to appear to be real.
Even Yelp, with all its suspicion and evaluation, allowed her to establish a business listing after verifying the”real existence” of her fake business. And while many of those fake reviews she paid for didn’t make it beyond Yelp’s filter, others did. Is not the Internet fun?
Anyway, here are a few common reasons why testimonials become filtered on Yelp:
Yelp does not trust users that have written a few reviews, especially if they don’t have any Yelp friends or profile information. I guess Yelp assumes you can not enjoy every experience.
It is not funny or useful. Other Yelp reviewers can mark a review as useful or funny. “Great service!” Really isn’t helping anyone.
The review violated Yelp’s Content Guidelines, which are fairly straightforward.
The IP is incorrect. Yelp uses IP addresses to ascertain whether or not a review is fake. Consequently, if a reviewer is on vacation and visits your business but waits until they get home to review it, that inspection is probably going to get filtered.
The CEO believes your reviews stink. Okay, that’s probably not a real reason, but he does say so in his Yelp profile.
While you have no real control over what gets filtered, you can still do a couple of things to make sure nothing you do causes difficulties for your Yelp page.
Never pay someone to assess your business. That’s illegal, and if you do, Yelp will find you and they’ll make certain everyone knows about it.
Do not provide a promotion to Yelpers in exchange for a review.
Don’t use Yelp as a competition or ad space. I mean, unless you are actually paying for Yelp’s slightly unethical marketing service. (Yelp was accused of pushing this service on companies by threatening to push negative testimonials higher on the business’ Yelp page.) They’ll spot Grandma’s glowing assessment a mile off.
You might also attempt 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 can add the reviewer for a friend or vote that the review useful, funny, or cool.
And if this does not work, consider finding a solution that works round the Yelp filter. We’ve developed a review marketing platform called Renown to aggregate all reviews into one spot. So, those five-star reviews your customers write might not appear on Yelp since the reviewer has no Yelp friends, but they will show up elsewhere. Click here to discover more about Renown.