Yelp! What’s the deal?

I don’t know. I really don’t. We can’t seem to break 5 reviews despite having 16 17 18 5-Star Reviews. Every time a customer adds a review, Yelp! decides that another review is not recommended. It’s ludicrous and crazy and beyond explanation. They claim it’s an “algorithm” that no human person has any influence over it to change the results. The crazy part is that they claim it’s because my reviewers are possibly “new” to Yelp! and don’t have many reviews. Here’s the number of reviews that my not recommended reviewers have. 1, 7, 9, 6, 4, 4, 1, 1, 2, 2, and 6. I mean some of them are new, but I’d hardly consider somebody with 4 reviews to be a new Yelp! user. The current “good” reviews have reviewers with 83, 21, 5, 36 and 2. Sure, there’s some hardcore Yelp! users, but two of them have less reviews than half the reviews they’ve deemed “not recommended” so that couldn’t be the only reason.

2/13/19 Edit: They did it to me AGAIN. A new review from a user that I helped a few months ago. They bumped another recent review into the “not recommended” review hell, so here we are stuck at 5 5-star Reviews with 17 total reviews. Honestly, I can’t remember seeing another business with so many “not recommended” reviews. It’s hard to stomach going out and doing a great job for customer after customer and having Yelp! just absolutely shit on my hard work. I’d love to be a martyr and simply pull my advertising from Yelp!, but frankly that’s some cutting off your nose to spite your face stuff that I’m not going to get involved in. Yelp! advertising WORKS, but their review system is irrevocably broken. In my opinion with all due respect.

3/29/19 Edit: Oh Yelp, you’ve done it again. Another 5-star review, two more 5-star customer reviews shit canned. Our total 5-star review count now stands at 21, with a whopping 16 being not recommended. Again, EVERY review we’ve received is legitimate. I could direct somebody from Yelp to the customer’s house to interview them in person. I’m so fed up with the Yelp review system. It’s so utterly broken it’s beyond saving.

12/1/19 Edit: I honestly can’t wait until the day that I get so much organic traffic from Google and Yelp! that I can stop giving Yelp any money. We now have 40 5-star reviews with a WHOPPING 27 5-star reviews being “Not Recommended.” That’s correct. My Yelp! number is 13 with more than two thirds of my reviews being “Not Recommended.” There’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to which reviews are placed in the trash heap by Yelp! Customers with 10, 20, 30, 50 reviews. Reviews that were recommended until I got another review and suddenly that old review is kicked out. It’s like somebody at Yelp! decided that 13 is the maximum allowable number of reviews that I can have at any one time. Every single one of those is from a real customer, left for us because we do such a great job that they thought they’d get on Yelp! where they found us and let other Yelpers know about it. I’ve looked at several of my competitors, more than several in fact, and the average “Not Recommended” reviews runs about 20% for guys with as many reviews as us. That means my number should likely be around 32. My number is 13!

What really chaps my hide about this whole Yelp! situation is that I know for a fact that one of my “competitors” pays for Yelp! reviews by offering a discount WHILE the customer pays. If they leave a Yelp! review while they pay, he gives them a discount. I mean just blatant fraud. I’ve had two customers that used this particular detailer tell me straight up that he did this. It’s not hard to figure out who it is, he’s a one man operation that has nearly 50 Yelp! reviews in less than a year. There’s NO WAY that any one man operation can get that kind of response in a year organically. NO WAY! One of my friends, who has been detailing in the Valley for nearly 15 years has 11 reviews. 11! In 15 years. Obviously Yelp! is not important to him, but come on, this guy is an institution here in the area and he’s been breaking his back out there every day for over a decade. We refuse to “pay” for reviews. We will ask you, if you’re happy with our work, to leave us a review.

I have come to accept the fact that there’s nothing I can do about this. Rest assured, all our reviews are legitimate and I have the pictures of every vehicle and the customer’s contact information to prove it.