This business acts like they are doing our communities a favor by making it so that reviews that our businesses has worked hard to get are no longer valid. Hiding behind a "proprietary software" that works to exclude people's reviews is a joke.
I have personally created accounts on amazon, yelp (a long time ago), and other platforms, just to show a business my appreciation - but apparently that doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter that they ask for our yelp page and we send them a link (because that is not organic).
The marketing and executive branches need to take a good hard look at themselves and determine if this is the kind of dishonest business they want to be running. Exploiting businesses and essentially forcing them to pay to get a ranking they should already have is very sad.
Rather appalled and disheartened to know that the hard work I put into my businesses doesn't matter on Yelp. Thanks for working with the little guy... not