How it is that Yelp hasn't been brought up on racketeering charges so far is the only mystery to me. They basically shake down small businessmen for "protection money" to ensure you have a good online presence on their site. If you pay off their goons they'll make sure people only see glowing reviews of your business, if you don't pay them they'll filter out all the good reviews and just display the bad ones, plus they'll add a few of their own for good measure. They really damaged my father's business through their actions and if the people harmed by their evil practices ever mount a class action lawsuit against them we'll be the first in line to sign on.
Initially I had read similar complaints online about Yelp but didn't believe them until it started happening to my Dad. When it played out exactly the way everyone else had said it would I knew what was going on. The clincher for us was this. My Dad had received about 40-50 reviews by the point they approached him and he had a decent rating (almost 4 stars). He probably even would have considered their offer but at this time they had a water main break and flood the building so he was already stuck having to spend a lot on cleanup and renovations and he had to close for 3-4 weeks. Imagine his surprise then when his Yelp rating fell to 2.5 stars and all the 5 star reviews started getting filtered out. Worse still, while he was closed for renovations he got 4 new 1-star reviews all within a week or so, all claiming horrible service and poor customer experience... funny how that could happen when he was closed huh?
These guys are outright crooks, they need to be shut down, uninstall their app on your phone, stop using their site, stop feeding the evil!