Yelp Accused Of Manipulating Customer Reviews And This Has One Restaurateur Steaming Mad

Yelp is being accused of manipulating customer reviews of a business when the owner refuses to purchase ads. This is what one restaurateur is claiming and believes his business is being unfairly punished by Yelp.

David Levi is the owner of Vinland, a restaurant in Portland, ME. After declining to buy ads on the Yelp website, he noticed that Steff Deschenes, Yelp’s local community manager, changed her personal Vinland experience rating from four stars to three stars even though her original review was done a year ago.

Additionally, in a report by the Portland Press Herald, Levi claims Yelp moved Vinland’s positive customer reviews to a section of their website where visitors have to click a “not recommended reviews” link at the bottom of the page. Unless Yelp visitors click this link, they may not see the restaurant’s positive reviews and may only find the negative reviews instead.

Levi says the star ranking downgrade and the customer reviews placement change happened right after he rejected an offer to buy ads as well as refusing to donate to local Yelp events.

Obviously, Levi was not happy with the Yelp changes and spoke out about it.

“We’ve had our frustrations with Yelp hiding a disproportionate number of our five-star reviews. To see the local representative make this downgrade so long after visiting is disturbing.”

Deschenes defended her decision to change her Yelp personal review of Vinland in an email to Levi.

“As a Yelp user, I have the right to change and/or update any of the reviews I’ve written about a business if my opinion about that business changes for whatever reason. I realized that because I personally did not enjoy my main course at your restaurant, I never felt inspired to return.”

A company spokesperson says Yelp community managers write reviews about their personal experience with a business and can change those reviews if desired.

This isn’t the first time the company has faced these allegations and as previously reported by the Inquisitr, Yelp has been accused of manipulating reviews by other businesses over the years.

Additionally, Marketing Land reports, Yelp has been hit with several lawsuits in the past contending they fix ratings based on how much, if any, advertising a business buys. Each time the plaintiffs in the cases could not prove Yelp did anything wrong and ended without any judgments against the company.

However, a 2014 ruling by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said Yelp had the right to move negative ratings up if they wanted to. In its ruling, the panel stated, “the business owners may deem the posting or order of user reviews as a threat of economic harm, but it is not unlawful for Yelp to post and sequence the reviews.”

Although the court granted Yelp latitude in the organization of business reviews, their website explicitly says it prohibits any manipulation based on a business buying advertising.

“There’s no amount of money a business can pay to manipulate their reviews or rating, and Yelp doesn’t skew things in favor of advertisers or against businesses that don’t.”

Although, this is exactly what Levi is accusing Yelp of doing and he is “taking this matter seriously.” We will see if he has enough of a complaint against Yelp to take them to court.

Despite current and past allegations, Yelp continues to stick with their position that the reviews are ranked by a computer algorithm and not human manipulated. Even though there is essentially no concrete evidence that Yelp fixes reviews in an effort to persuade a business to advertise, there remains a common belief among business owners that Yelp does indeed participate in such practices.

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