Mike A.

I signed up for a business account on Yelp and was completely disappointed with their service. I'm giving them one star because they are only concerned with taking a small business person's advertising dollars over helping that small business gain customers and succeed.

I started paying for advertising with Yelp a few months ago, but stopped as soon as they accused me of soliciting reviews from my customers. Apparently, they use some type of software that tests a reviewer's past history of submitting reviews and uses other algorithms to decide is the review is legitimate because they hid three reviews that customers posted about on my service by telling me that their software found those reviews to be inauthentic because their software says I asked my customers to post them.

This is a lie and when I escalated my dissatisfaction for being accused of soliciting the reviews to their customer service, they read a script over and over about their antiquated review policy. So when I stopped paying for advertising on their site, the Account Manager called me and had the mitigated gall to ignore my complaints about the reviews that they didn't recommend. I also asked them to remove one of the reviews that the customer wanted removed but just didn't have time to do it, but they said it was against their policy.

The account manager went on to tell me that since I had only spent $1000, that this was the reason why I was only getting two clicks per day in their pay per click advertising program.

Ironically, since I stopped paying to advertise on Yelp Biz, I continue to get those same two quote requests per day on Yelp. This makes the money that I was paying to advertise on it, unnecessary.

The AM proceeded to tell me that in order to get more clicks that would lead to more quote requests, that I was competing with other businesses that were paying upwards of $10,000 dollars each month to advertise on Yelp to get more clicks.

This is totally ridiculous and their review policy is outdated and delusional when they take a non-paying consumer's review over a paying advertiser's requests to post the hidden reviews that Yelp lists as "not recommended" because of their faulty software programs. I also responded to each customers review in a manner deemed professional and rational to resolve any dissatisfaction.

I will never spend another dollar on Yelp nor will I look at or take into consideration any of their reviews before I make a purchase. If Yelp was really concerned about their paying business client's ability to gain more business by advertising on their site, they wouldn't make such a big deal about reviews when certain circumstances make a review inauthentic anyway.

Look for this company to fall in the next few years if they don't change this policy! I'm going to post this review in Google as well.