YelpReviews 1,589

Small businesses rely on customer reviews. When we contacted Yelp about how they arbitrarily remove good reviews we were told to watch the video about their policies. He wouldn't give us any sound reasoning. I don't think Google would be so rude as to dismiss an advertising business so quickly. Don't rely on Yelp. The reviews you see are hand picked by Yelp and unless you use them frequently they simply remove any pertinent comments about your business.

Over the past couple of years, i have had several 5 star reviews on Yelp. Every year I get a call from their sales agent who claim that I should advertise with them to keep my competitors from getting the business. They ask you what a new job is worth, then equate a phone call as being the reason you get a new job. So they ask for about $300 a month and tells you that they will get you lead which will allow you to recover the cost. If you delcine their pitch, after a little while they claim that the reviews which were live are no longer valid because their secret program has screened the reviewer out as not being a quality Yelper. So in their opinion, everyone opinion does not have the same weight. If you really think about it, as a business, the opinion of a guy who goes around and spend 10 - 20 dollar per transactions, weights more than an individual who would go out and spend $10,000 or more in one transaction. So quality customer reviews are overlooked and hidden because they don't review as frequently. The shake down is the same as someone coming and asking your to pay protection, because they are protecting you from them.

My husband just retired and we decided to completely re-furnish our living room. Many times previously, we have purchased and shopped the decorator center of Los Angeles, located on Melrose: we can say that Italy2000 meets the same quality on hight-end quality furniture.

Today if you are looking for fine furniture at a fine furniture store, you know they are very hard to find with the exclusion of Robertson and the Beverly Hill Area.

The owner of Italy2000 Sherman Oaks is Ray. With his help we purchased a custom-made luxury couch, love seat and chair. It is not so much the items we chose, it is the craftsmanship of them, and they are velvet with satin and rope. The pattern is so exquisite, brocade, diamond shaped and tufting with gorgeous swirls and beautiful golden legs

We also purchased a magnificent coffee table, the top is 3/4 inch thick fine crackle glass and a Lalique like pedestal along with two end tablets with a 3/4 inch thick clear glass top, also with a Lalique like pedestal. Then we found two elegant crystal floor lamps and many exquisite appointments, art objects and accessories.

My husband and I are able to say that we love our living room so much that we sit in it every day, look around and enjoy everything. It is like when we were in Monaco admiring their Beautiful Hotel.

So our gratitude goes to Ray for having the taste in furniture in his store to please us. He is a wonderful businessman and now a friend.

Thank you for all you have done for us.

Joy and Aaron

This is a refreshing restaurant that opened five months ago in Encinitas/Leucadia area. The food is good value and actually tasty and different from the usual fare of this area. They call themselves Vietnamese cuisine, and there were definitely flavors from Thailand and the Eastern orient. We had an impressive selection of appetizers and entrees to choose from, all very reasonable priced. Nice wine and beer list too. What we liked about the menu as well is that you choose the basics of the entree (for example pineapple, rice and vegetables) and then you choose your protein (if you want it) - either chicken, gulf shrimp or pork. This offers many options but it is simple to understand. We went at 5pm and the place was empty and within an hour every table was full - hip people, kids and elderly- the full gamut. Another bonus to its cleanliness is that the ceiling is high enough and the furniture and such appointed well enough that voices do not travel and it is not too loud, like many other places in the area. With a town of a lot of mediocre restaurants at expensive price points this is a refreshing addition.

Yelp will delete reviews that violate terms of service within the review such as using profanity which is fine. A business can pay to have reviews sent to the "not recommended" section which is at the very bottom and you have to really look for it. Really bad businesses usually have quite a large "not recommended" section and that's where you find the most honest reviews. Also don't discount a Yelp reviewer if the Yelper who wrote the review has limited reviews, there are people who don't live on social media and are only inspired to write for an excellent or truly horrible experience with a business. It is true Yelp won't delete a review unless it violates terms of service but they will make it hard to find negative reviews and the reviews that get banished to "not recommended" won't count in overall star rating.

I recently had a fence installed by a company that had poor reviews but high recommendation from a friend. I discussed this with the owner and he informed me that Yelp wouldn't show the positive reviews unless he paid them. I took that with a grain of salt and had him install a fence anyway. They did an outstanding job, so I wrote a 5 star review on yelp. 5 days later I look back at his reviews and they only showed the negative ones... not mine. So, I now believe the fence company owner and realize just how much of a scam/money hungry the Yelp website/company really is. I will never associate any credibility with Yelp again.

Let's just say if you were one of the popular kids in school and want to provide free content in the form of reviews for a totally corrupt site, you will love the s#! T out of this piece of trash site.

If you are not one of those people (me included) prepare to be bullied all over again. It WILL happen, guaranteed. From the top down. Elite is a f##king joke.

Get a few scraps of "free" food, awkwardly interact with people you hate... I have fully described the elite experience. I forgot to mention, they constantly control your content and pictures. By the local guard your wonderful community manager.

If someone threatens your life, and you are not on the CM's personal VIP list, oh well, you can go f##k yourself. Enjoy writing free reviews that may or may not be flagged by your "fans".

Or threatened vaguely with legal action by Yelp for a credible review, which like everything else on Yelp is fake. Enjoy your free scraps and mind control. I f##king loved every minute of it.

I have been writing reviews on Yelp for a long time, honest, both positive and not so positive. I foolishly believed the reviews were anonymous so I could be honest. After a recent negative review I heard from the business owner who told me he would provide the service I had been waiting four months for if I changed my review. That is blackmail. I heard from him again when I did not change it. I had no idea my contact information was available to business owners, who could then harass me. Contact with Yelp twice returned the same boilerplate response. End of my Yelp career.

When I spend the time to sign in and write a review and it does not go through, I stop wasting my time doing more reviews for them.

I was reviewing another company on YELP. I think it is extremely important for people not to sign up for a course on line, because the on line payment page is not secure. Yelp removed it saying it does not comply with their guidelines. So how many people will get identity theft because of YELP removing the review?

Yelp.com uses all kinds of spy cookies and other means to infiltrate consumer-based reviews. In simple English, their programmers have (and use) ways to discover who you are, your identity, email, and possibly a lot of other information.
Considering they lead you to think you are reporting possibly anonymously, it is not such whatsoever. Example: I wrote a legitimate review about an optometrist who has really bilked me for the money using a pseudonym. They had someone respond to my review presumably from the optometrist company. Indeed his name sounds familiar but it is fake because the respondent also offers another name.

Here's the telling fact: Respondent addressed me by a previous pseudonym, one I had stopped using over a year ago. Respondent named a franchise that had closed down over two years ago that I had once used satisfactorily. I may even have given them a positive review a few years ago. Respondent could not have possibly dredged up all this information (previous pseudonym, reference to previous glasses at previous franchise as a basis for customer compliment) in just a few minutes (the responder from the optometrist posted just after I finished the review on a late by east coast time weekend evening).

So it's obviously Yelp has IT specialist posing as respondents from the company but addressing the customer using details obtained from previous Yelp postings and reviews.

We also have reason to believe Yelp is not a safe site. Try to open Yelp as a proxy website from IE and it will not open if you have a decent safety wall. Warning that the site has suspicious attack code embedded. I don't think it's unsafe, but I do believe they use spy cookies.

The review on the optometrist was warranted because, if I make a Trumpian assertation, it was. The franchise may change, but my visit was unpleasant enough that I did not want to go back. They work at being intimidating, and the doctor at being vaguely harassing. And the place is overpriced. And they take advantage especially of middle-aged women of color. That is my opinion and impression. I share it because I want to prevent other women from being exploited. It's just the decent (not at all sociopathic as 4% reviewer believes) thing to do.

Yelp is awful for small businesses. They extort money for advertising and hide valid reviews. They do not accurately report the number of clicks on ads and charge near the max cut off at over $500. It is a scam, They bully people into 3 month contracts and have a hidden clause saying 30 day notice for cancellation, so they can charge another month. DONT SPEND A DIME ON THIS SCAM. LET YOUR CUSTOMERS NATURALLY POST REVIEWS ON YELP FOR FREE. Yelp will hide most of them anyway.

Clean Sweep Yard Maintenance is the worse. The owner really loves to use the leaf blower. He spends one half hour every other week at our house to maintain an acre. Has to be told to cut back growth, never maintains the roses and at 72 years of age I have to drag the yard waste barrel from our backyard and toss the yard waste into the recycle yard waist at the bottom of my driveway for Waste Management to pick up weekly. We get what we pay for... the worst yard maintenance in Napa.

There was a point in my life that I loved Yelp and rose in RANKS and became an Elite!

This is my warning to Yelpers who post reviews including Elite Yelpers!
Don't waste your time doing reviews on Yelp. Yelp is using you to write reviews to promote their service in which they blackmail businesses. Use Foursquare, Tripadvisors or SiteJabber to do your reviews.

I made several reviews on several doctors and all these reviews stayed up for several years. Some even stayed up over 5 years and a few of them got many support from other Yelpers and Elites. When the doctors eventually started paying for their monthly membership fees my negative reviews about them disappeared and Yelp claimed that I was making personal attacks on doctors instead of the businesses.

SECOND, my Whole YELP experience became a nightmare when one of the doctors sued me to Stop me from exercising my 1st Amendment rights even when my review was similar to many other victims of this doctor! Yelp started removing other reviews by this doctor who started opening up multiple locations. Yelp did nothing and even cooperated with the doctor by removing my negative review even when this doctor had over 100 complaints against him on Yelp and with the State Medical board! I ended up costing me $20k to defend myself!

In conclusion, I was USED by Yelp and others feel the same! I did so much to HELP Yelp and to promote Yelp. I even carried Yelp business cards and suggested businesses to get themselves registered with Yelp.

There is absolutely NO REASON to use Yelp for business reviews because all the negative reviews are removed by monthly membership fees that Yelp extort from Business Owners!