Some businesses may soon find that their ratings on Google have changed for better or for worse. They’re doing away with old anonymous Zagat reviews – the ones where the person’s name is “A Zagat User.”
To show a consistent reviews experience to our users, reviews that are labeled by “A Zagat User” are being removed from Google products. Reviews from Google users will still appear as usual, and users can still contribute reviews. This may affect the overall rating for some businesses.
If your business has a lot of negative anonymous reviews from Zagat, this is probably good news. If it has a lot of positive ones, then perhaps not so much.
Either way, Google has been migrating away from anonymity in reviews for quite a while. When it migrated to the Google+ Local model for local search, it started requiring users to be signed into their Google accounts to leave reviews. Still, Google continued to show anonymous reviews that said “A Google User” for new reviews for sometime after that. It still displays these for older reviews.
Yelp has been in the headlines as business owners have been complaining. You’re shocked, right? This seems to be a narrative that the company just can’t shake.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article called “Yelp’s Deal With Yahoo Has Small Businesses Crying Foul”. As it says, businesses owners are complaining that Yahoo has trashed “years of positive feedback from customers” in favor of Yelp’s reviews, which many businesses have already been critical of. Angus Loten reports:
Colonial Hardwood Flooring of Lexington, Mass., amassed six years of mostly positive feedback on its Yahoo Local listing, says owner Dan Tringale. But several weeks ago, after Yahoo began posting reviews from Yelp, nearly 50 Yahoo reviews disappeared, he says.
Potential customers searching Yahoo won’t see a 2012 recommendation that Carla Fortmann confirms she and her husband wrote: “This floor is beautiful and it was very carefully done.” Nor will Yahoo searchers find a June 2012 review from Regina Sasso, of Wilmington, Mass., who says Colonial “provided a competitive quote and delivered meticulous service and work.”
Such praise has been replaced by a single, punctuation-challenged Yelp review, from the “Paul M” screen name, “Respected budget got difficult stain taken care of very attentive and house got an offer opening weekend.”
This is anecdotal, but it’s certainly not the only complaint. I imagine we’ll be hearing more and more as time goes on.
Bloomberg TV ran a segment this week including a discussion with both a disgruntled business owner, and a Yelp exec.
Beverly Ulbrich, is the owner of The Pooch Coach, and says she had about 20 reviews up on Yahoo, and then they just disappeared. All the reviews from Yahoo went away, she said. “We can’t even find or locate them anymore,” she added. They were replaced by reviews from Yelp.
As Beverly explains, the Yahoo reviews weren’t filtered, and many of them, she says, had 5.5 out of 6 stars. On Yelp, she said, they filter and get rid of good reviews some times “or in my case most of the time”.
“If you just look at my Yelp reputation it really looks bad,” she says.
Yelp’s Vincent Sollitto, VP of corporate communications says: “Yelp has to recommend reviews that they find reliable. The reason that there are a number of positive reviews for Beverly’s business that are not being recommended is because in fact ten of them came from the very IP address that was used to claim her business owner’s account, and one of them actually was for a one-star review of a competing business to hers. And so the problem is business owners try to game the system, and websites that don’t try to filter out or verify reliable reviews can get gamed. That’s probably why Yahoo decided to go ahead and use Yelp as the de facto standard for local search.”
Beverly responds, “First of all, in some cases, clients are at your house, and can be using your IP address to write something. That is possible. IP address isn’t the best judgment. people can be at a cafe and use IP address, you know. I don’t think the location of a person writing the review is relevant. I had one guy, for instance, that is in my five-star-deleted – i’ve had like 34 deleted five-star reviews now – I mean not recommended – and another fourteen that have been deleted. And meanwhile I only have seven five-star reviews up. So that’s a big ratio. We’re talking a fifty to seven ratio here. I had one guy that had to go to the library and open an account in order to be able to write a review for me because he didn’t have a computer service, and he wanted to be able to review me because I did good work with him, and he was very pleased, and Yelp removed his review because it seemed suspicious or whatever, but he’s a real person.”
She also says nobody would help her get things straightened out, which brings up a good point, and one echoed by the interviewer. He asks if there is a process Yelp has that could help businesses clear things like this up.
He kind of dances around the question, and is then again asked, “Is there a process by which Beverly can take, and see if some of this can be corrected or modified?”
“I’m not sure what’s to correct or modify,” he says. “I’m trying to explain that Yelp serves as a recommendation service. We help consumers know what the Yelp community thinks about local businesses. Consumers like that approach, and use it, and that’s what helps them find local businesses. There are certainly other businesses that take other approaches, but we have to make sure that the information on our site is reliable.”
I guess that’s a no.
He also doesn’t bother to acknowledge the points Beverly made about cases where people could legitimately be using the same IP addresses, unless Bloomberg cut that part out. That’s where the segment ends.
Could Yelp improve its communication channel with businesses? Do its reviews make Yahoo local search more reliable? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Mobile local ad revenues in the U.S. are expected to hit $4.5 billion this year, according to a new report from BIA/Kelsey. That would be a massive increase over last year, which saw $2.9 billion.
And that’s really just the beginning. The firm is projecting mobile local ad revenues to more than triple over the next five years, reaching as high as $15.7 billion in 2018.
It expects mobile ad spending in general in the U.S. to reach $11.4 billion in 2014 and $30.3 billion in 2018. By the end of that year, it says, locally targeted mobile ads will be 52% of overall mobile ad spending in the U.S.
“Advertiser demand will be driven by natural market forces to follow undervalued inventory,” said Michael Boland, senior analyst and VP of content at BIA/Kelsey. “Mobile advertising’s appeal includes higher performance, clearer ROI, tangible conversions and a shorter purchase funnel. These qualities of mobile content and advertising present a rare alignment between typical mobile user intent and advertisers’ stated objectives.”
Tactics like geo-fencing, click-to-call, and click-to-map are helping drive up spend on mobile local advertising, according to the firm.
BIA/Kelsey expects mobile search ad revenues to grow from $4.3 billion in 2014 to $10.9 billion in 2018, native social ad revenue to grow from $3.3 billion in 2014 to $9.9 billion in 2018, mobile display (app and mobile web) ad revenue to grow from $2.4 billion in 2014 to $6.1 billion in 2018, mobile video ad revenue to grow from $1.1 billion in 2014 to $3.1 billion in 2018, and SMS ad revenue to grow from $332 million in 2014 to $381 million in 2018.
Google has released some recommendations for webmastesr to help them get the search engine to identify and surface business info like phone numbers, business locations, and opening hours. They also launched support for schema.org to help specify preferred phone numbers using structured data markup.
“Many people also turn to Google to find and discover local businesses, and the best information is often on a website’s contact us or branch locator page. These location pages typically include the address of the business, the phone number, opening hours, and other information,” says Google in a blog post.
“In addition to building great location pages, businesses are encouraged to continue using Places for Business, which is a fast and easy way to update your information across Google’s service such as Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph and AdWords campaigns,” it adds.
You can find the recommendations for location pages for local businesses and organizations here. It goes into how to have each location’s info accessible, how to let Googlebot discover, crawl and index location pages, Havascript and other page assets, how location info should be presented, and using schema.org markup.
Schema.org supports four types of phone numbers: customer service, technical support, billing support, bill payment. For each one, you must indicate if it’s toll-free, suitable for the hearing-impaired, and whether it’s global or only for specific countries. More on all this here.
We heard last month that Yahoo and Yelp were teaming up to add local business reviews to Yahoo’s local search results. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reportedly revealed the partnership in an employee meeting. These things never stay inside the company.
Anyhow, both companies have now announced the partnership and integration. When Yahoo users in the U.S. look up local businesses, they’ll see user reviews, business information, and star ratings from Yelp as well as photos from Yelp, other partners, and the businesses themselves.
“At Yahoo, we’re always looking to build great partnerships to provide a richer experience for our users,” says Anand Chandrasekaran, Senior Director, Product Management at Yahoo. “That’s why we’re especially fired up to add trusted user content from Yelp, bringing more business listings, more photos, and more reviews to the recently-refreshed Local Search and Yahoo Maps experiences. With information and photos for retail chains, mom and pop shops, spas, doctors and hospitals, restaurants, and more, Yelp is a welcome addition to our roster of local content partners.”
“With local searches making up about 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic, the demand for reliable local information is high, and we’re excited to make this experience even richer for Yahoo users,” says Mike Ghaffary, Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at Yelp. “Across all categories of local business, from dog groomers and day spas to nightclubs and burger joints, trusted content from Yelp’s vibrant community of locals will help Yahoo users decide where to spend their money.”
Both companies consider Yelp reviews to be “trusted,” and perhaps they are by many, but it has become clear that there are also quite a few businesses and consumers that don’t exactly trust what they read on the site. This week, we reported on none other than Andrew Zimmern blasting the site and its reviews. We also hear from businesses all the time (see the comments sections of most of our Yelp articles) that they don’t care for Yelp, often saying it hurts them more than helps them. Yelp itself, also continues to deal with the never-ending problem of fake reviews.
Yelp is taking some harsh criticism in the media once again. Its handling of fake reviews is coming under fire, as is its worth to consumers. Business owners are speaking out (as usual), and celebrity chef/TV personality/food writer Andrew Zimmern, who has been critical of Yelp in the past, is calling it “worthless”.
Yelp recently announced that it had handed out a new round of consumer alerts – warnings that appear on business pages – calling out businesses for alleged foul Yelp review play. It also renewed alerts on some businesses that had previously received them.
“We normally remove alerts after 90 days, but we won’t hesitate to renew them if we continue to see suspicious activity,” said Yelp’s Kristen Whisenand on the company blog. “That’s exactly what happened for two businesses this time around. We again found something amiss with two of the locations for Chicago-based nail salon, Azure Nails. And someone was caught red-handed yet again trying to buy reviews for Evergreen.”
Chicago’s ABC 7 spoke with Azure’s owner Hoang Bui as well as with a Yelp spokesperson, who said Yelp found a “large number of positive reviews” coming from the same IP address, which it considered “a sign of someone trying to game the system and mislead consumers”. The news outlet reports:
When asked if he or his employees were writing reviews, Bui said “No. We have Wi-Fi here, and I asked my clients to write reviews right here in my business, and my clients use Wi-Fi here.”
But Yelp says it has additional evidence, including a negative review of a rival salon, from that same IP address.
Bui has his own allegations. He said he believes Yelp has made negative reviews more visible because he refused to pay for advertising.
In fact, the subject came up yet again in a report last week from WTOC in Savannah.
Cathi Denham, the owner of doggie day care and luxury pet hotel Catnip n Biscuits said, “Customers leave reviews when they’re mad at us for something we wouldn’t do their way, and they’re negative reviews. We have some really good reviews on Yelp also, but you’ll never see those because they’re hidden in the filter button to filter out the good ones. It’s just wrong….it will say Yelp doesn’t recommend these reviews, but that’s where all our good reviews are. There’s no good reviews on the front page.”
She said that her rating dropped, and that is when Yelp began soliciting her to advertise.
“They don’t say it, but I know people that do advertise with Yelp that their negative reviews then disappear, and only the positive reviews show up,” she said.
Yeah, we’ve heard this story over and over again. Yelp denies that this happens, and calls such accusations “conspiracy theories” and the result of the Woozle effect. Yet the accusations keep coming from business owner after business owner.
Zimmern didn’t really get into any of that specifically, but says he finds Yelp and products like it to be “increasingly worthless” as a consumer. He was critical of Yelp’s ability to maintain legitimate content.
He told Eater, “Do I think that there’s some sort of satanic conspiracy going on over there or some covert plan to compensate people? No, I don’t. Do I think that there are some people who have taken a rogue position and easily tried to stretch boundaries and stuff? Yes, I do. That’s what happens with organizations that are horizontal and not vertical. In today’s world, especially the digital world, especially with a product like Yelp, the organization is horizontal and not vertical. There are always people trying to take advantage of stuff like this, so I imagine, sure, I don’t think Yelp can do a lot about how people interact with this forum.”
“It is their responsibility, and policing it is just a hard job,” he added. “That’s why I’m not giving them a pass. They’re probably scrambling to figure this shit out as much as anyone. I will tell you flat out that I continually find Yelp and products like it to be increasingly worthless to me as a consumer. That’s really where I feel strongest about it.”
He said later in the interview, “The last thing I want to do is utilize a service where millions of people are chiming in, and the results are tainted. Either it’s people who don’t know what they’re talking about shouting over the people who do … Look. There’s lots of people on Yelp whose opinions I would love to have, but you know what, I can’t use on Yelp, because Yelp to me is worthless.”
On Yelp’s effects on businesses, he told Eater, “Yelp, in a very perverse way, I may not like them or recommend them, but they have hit a core amongst viewers and they can move the needle. A good review in the New York Times used to be worth two million dollars. A good review on Yelp, they’ve put some sort of number attached to that. God bless them. It helps them sell ads, I’m sure. I think it’s a defective mechanism. It’s very, very popular. There’s tens of millions of people on that site.”
Either way, Yelp is encouraging people to leave a lot more reviews, and to say more in the reviews they do leave.
Fast Company interviewed Yelp Consumer and Mobile Products Vice President Eric Singley, who said the company has “always emphasized quality over quantity.”
But at the end of the year, Yelp sang the praises of its user who had written the most reviews during 2013. He wrote 1,712, which is roughly five a day. At that point, he had written about 7,000 of the site’s 47 million reviews.
Last year, Yelp finally made it so that users of its mobile apps can leave reviews, which has greatly contributed to quantity. Yelp released its Q4 and full year 2013 financials last month, and revealed that during the quarter, it had approximately 53 million mobile unique visitors and 30% of new reviews were contributed through mobile devices.
Yelp is actively encouraging higher quality with these reviews, however. Or at least higher word count. Singley pointed out to Fast Company for those who try to leave really short reviews, the app tells them, “This review is shorter than most.” They consider this “a nudge in the right direction.”
Do you think Yelp is doing a good job of maintaining quality content throughout its site? Are businesses being treated fairly? Is the Yelp experience valuable to consumers? Tell us what you think.
Google has run into some “complications” upgrading local businesses to the new Places dashboard.
In some cases, businesses’ accounts and another accounts that they don’t control were both verified for the same business using the old Places dashboard. In other cases, the businesses may have verified multiple times from the accounts they do control. Either way, it has resulted in duplicates.
Google has been sending out emails to affected businesses, which say:
We’d like to inform you that Google Places no longer accommodates more than one authorized owner per business location. Your account contains one or more listings that have been identified as duplicates of other listings and as a result, some of the information you provide will not be shown to Google users anymore…
By logging into your Google Places for Business dashboard, you can view the duplicate listing, which will show a banner reading, “You cannot update this listing because it has been marked as a duplicate of another.” If you no longer want to manage this listing, you can remove this listing from your dashboard. Alternatively, you can request administrative access from the current owner of the listing using the link to Learn more in your dashboard.
It’s possible that someone else in your organization, or a third party whom you once worked with, verified the business in another account. If you don’t believe anyone else could possibly be active in managing this business information, other than yourself, you can always contact support directly to help restore your account’s access to the listing.
She then talks about three scenarios: Multiple known verified accounts from old Places dashboard; Verified same business in both Google Places and in Google+, same account; and Verified same business in both Google Places and in Google+, different accounts.
In any of these situations, you can keep the duplicate listing instead of the active one if you wish.
If any of this affects you, definitely read Wang’s whole post.
Google and The Local Media Consortium, which is made up of 800 newspapers and 200 local broadcast outlets from 41 member companies throughout the U.S., announced a strategic partnership, which will see Google providing the consortium’s members with ad products.
The consortium will launch a private ad exchange powered by Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange technology. Additionally, members will have access to DoubleClick for Publishers, and the option to run AdSense ads on their sites and Google Custom Search-powered search results.
“The Local Media Consortium represents the best of what the web has to offer in terms of content and engaged local audiences,” said Laurent Cordier, Managing Director, Americas Partnerships, News & Magazines for Google. “We’re looking forward to working with their leadership and members to build on this partnership and help grow the businesses of valued newspapers and news stations from across the country.”
“By partnering with Google we are able to bring Google’s digital tools, technology and sales opportunities to all of our media members and our advertisers across the country,” said Patrick J. Talamantes, President and CEO of consortium member The McClatchy Company. “The vast size and scale of the Consortium’s collective audience makes this kind of partnership possible with one of the world’s top digital companies. We’re excited about the possibilities of this partnership.”
Consortium member sites account for 10 billion monthly ad impressions, 2 billion page views and 240 million monthly unique visitors.
Google announced that it has made some tweaks to the Google Places Quality Guidelines, specifically for business names. The changes illustrate how you can add descriptors.
Jade Wang announced the update ion a post on the Google Product Forums. Under “Business Name,” it now says:
Your title should reflect your business’s real-world title.
In addition to your business’s real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers.
Marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, or URLs are not valid descriptors.
Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in italics for demonstration purposes) are “Starbucks Downtown” or “Joe’s Pizza Restaurant”. Examples that would not be accepted would be “#1 Seattle Plumbing”, “Joe’s Pizza Best Delivery”, or “Joe’s Pizza Restaurant Dallas”.
Late last month, Google announced that it was adding 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard for businesses. This is an effort to significantly expand the breadth of available categories internationally.
The announcement was made in the Google product forums, and on Friday, that announcement received an update from Google’s Jade Wang, who had some additional news to share:
Additionally, we’ve just launched support for regional dialects in business categories on both Places for Business and Google Maps! As an example, an English speaking business owner in India can now choose the commonly used term Petrol Pump as their business category instead of the term Gas Station, which is uncommon in India. This new feature improves localization of business categories for more than a dozen countries.
Unfortunately, Wang did not specify which countries are getting these new options, but if you’ve had to select on oddly-worded version of your own category, you might want to check back in with the dashboard, and see if they’ve added something more appropriate.
Yelp announced that it is rolling out a new site design along with a new look for business pages. Rather than making a few teaks, the’ve elected to take the “from the ground up” approach.
The new design plays up local content contributed by Yelp users, while also making it easier to find business info.
“Since photos are used to determine an incredible amount about a business, the new design puts them front and center,” says product manager Brad Menezes. “Instead of a small thumbnail, we’re featuring up to six big, beautiful photos of the business. Now a quick glance at a restaurant’s page can give you a feel for the dining experience, food quality and ambiance, all within mere seconds.”
This follows changes Yelp made last year to match users’ photos with their reviews.
“Yelp’s review highlights give you a birds-eye-view of our community’s favorite elements of a business,” says Menezes. “Because review highlights are so useful, we’ve given them a huge upgrade, mining our review data to call out the best menu items, prices and important information like whether a bar is beer and wine only. Looks like we should head to Tataki South during happy hour, try the Garlic Edamame to start and order the one-of-a-kind Extinguisher Roll (yum!).”
They’ve also adjusted the column width and font size to make it easier to read reviews, while adding large photos in-line.
In other Yelp news, the company has partnered with Yahoo to integrate its reviews and listings into Yahoo local search results.
Well this is interesting. We were just talking about how Yelp is growing like a weed, and seems to be unstoppable. We were also talking about how Yahoo is looking for a way out of its partnership with Microsoft, and wants to build its own search technology again.
Now, Yahoo and Yelp are reportedly joining forces to help Yahoo improve its local search results. According to the Wall Street Journal, the partnership was unveiled by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at an employee meeting on Friday, and will see Yahoo incorporate Yelp listings and reviews of local businesses into its search engine. The feature will be rolled out to users within the coming weeks.
In other words, if your business is on Yelp, you’re about to see even more visibility for your reviews, whether they’re good or bad.
Last week, Yelp revealed that its cumulative reviews had grown 47% from the same time the previous year to 53 million, and that mobile engagement has been up dramatically since it added the ability to add reviews from the apps. Average unique monthly visitors grew 39% to 120 million.
It will be interesting to see if Yahoo makes similar partnerships for other types of search results, which could ultimately make it less dependent on Microsoft’s Bing. Search in general is already moving further away from pure organic results as the main point of focus. Look at how Google continues to push them down. And let’s not forget that Yahoo and Google aren’t exactly the bitter enemies you might think. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has even expressed interest in a partnership since Mayer took over as CEO.
Google announced that it is making some changes to how business pages are created.
Businesses creating listings in the new Places for Business dashboard will no longer have to wait to complete PIN verification before they can see the +page. That goes for “most businesses,” though the company didn’t get very specific on just what that means.
Jade Wang says in the Google and Your Business product forum (via Search Engine Roundtable), “Just follow the link from your dashboard to see the new page. You will be able to use Google+ social features on this unverified page, but please note — you still need to complete PIN verification before the page will start showing up in Google Maps and across other Google properties.”
“If you’ve got an unverified local Google+ page (made using Google+ in the local business/place category), then we still encourage you to PIN verify this page so that it can start appearing in Google Maps and across other Google properties,” she adds.
Google notes that if you create a local Google+ for a business it thinks is already in Google Maps, you may still ned to go through both PIN verification and the admin request flow before you actually get to manage the page.
The changes are rolling out gradually.
Earlier this week, Wang announced that Google Places For Business is getting over 1,000 new categories internationally.
Google is working on improving and expanding the business categories for Google Places For Business for countries around the world. In fact, they’re adding over 1,000 new categories in the Places dashboard.
So you might be wondering: why hadn’t we already done that? Well, international business categorization is quite tricky. Imagine you’re planning a trip to Greece. When you search from the US, you’ll probably be using English, and you’ll see the categories of Greek businesses in English. However, those businesses in Greece were probably set in Greek using Places for Business in Greek. This means the Places for Business team has to translate and associate categories in many languages. As you can imagine, this can become very complicated very quickly.
Today, we are taking a first step of many to improve categories that merchants can use to represent their businesses. Specifically, we’re adding over 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard. These categories are available globally and translated to every language Google supports.
If you run a business page, you’re going to want to keep an eye on the categories, and change accordingly if you think you can do better than what you have now.
MapQuest announced that it has made some adjustments to the way businesses can manage their listings. The AOL-owned company says the changes make the process of handling information corrections more streamlined.
In other words, it’s now easier to change contact info, hours of operation, addresses, etc.
“For nearly two decades, MapQuest has been helping people get from A to B,” MapQuest’s Laura Maxwell said in a blog post. “We’ve introduced tools, we’ve improved the interface and, after observing how people interact with our products, we iterate again. One such instance is how businesses are using the MapQuest Local Business Center (LBC).”
“This has always been and will continue to be a free service. For businesses looking to amplify their presence, whether it be monitoring customer reviews, adding enhanced content to a listing or syncing content with their business Facebook page, MapQuest will still offer business solutions there, too,” Maxwell added.
At the end of the month, MapQuest will be retiring the basic LBC version, though it will continue a partnership with Yext, which provides listing enhancement tools.
Image via MapQuest
The story has been going on for quite some time. Businesses accuse Yelp of “extortion” or holding their positive reviews hostage unless they spend advertising money, and Yelp denies it vehemently, citing a lack of evidence and research appearing to contradict it.
But the story isn’t going away, as more accusations make their way to the public eye.
Has Yelp sufficiently proven that such accusations are unsubstantiated? Tell us what you think.
Last week, the Seattle Times ran a guest column by Terry Thomas, a small business owner who has taught business ethics at Seattle University and the University of Washington.
“Shortly after our company began receiving positive reviews on Yelp, an energetic Yelp salesman called me, congratulating me on our company’s online reviews, and offering to help boost our Internet presence with one of several of Yelp’s marketing programs,” he wrote. “Once I was finally able to get him to answer my question about what the price would be, I was staggered: $8,400 per year for their midlevel program. I politely declined.”
After that, Thomas claimed his positive reviews began to be filtered or “buried deep” within the site and “difficult to access.” Only positive reviews had been moved, he said. The more negative reviews moved up the page and were featured more prominently.
It’s pretty much the same story we’ve been hearing for a long time. One business owner even shared it with Judge Milian on The People’s Court:
“Some business owners have even gone so far as to take these accusations to court, but their claims keep getting dismissed for lack of any fact-based evidence,” blogged Yelp’s VP Communications & Public Affairs, Vince Sollitto, at the time.
He pointed to research finding no connection between advertising and Yelp’s automated filtering.
With the data set employed, a Harvard Business School study found that “none of the advertise interaction effects are statistically significant,” and that “neither 1- nor 5-star reviews were significantly more or less likely to be filtered for businesses that were advertising on Yelp at the time we collected our dataset.”
It went on to conclude, “Yelp’s current implementation of the filtering algorithm does not treat advertisers’ reviews in a manner different to non-advertisers’ reviews. While we have no direct knowledge of how Yelp’s filtering algorithm works, the lack of filtering biases associated with advertising increases our confidence in using filtered reviews as an unbiased, albeit imperfect, proxy for fake reviews.”
You can find the report in its entirety here. Find section 3.4 for more details on the methodology.
“A simple Google search debunks the conspiracy,” Sollitto wrote. “Want to see if businesses that advertise on Yelp really do get ‘special treatment?’ Feel free to do your own version of a simple Google test like this [site:yelp.com/biz ‘Yelp sponsor’ AND ‘rude staff’] by inserting your own negative phrases in the last set of quotation marks. The words ‘Yelp Sponsor’ only appear on pages of advertisers, which begs the question: if these Yelp advertisers get a special ‘Delete’ button for negative reviews, why in the world aren’t they using it? (Hint: because it doesn’t exist.) Nor is there any rational incentive for a Yelp sales team member to jeopardize his or her career by pitching a product that can’t be delivered because it doesn’t exist.”
Thomas says he’s not buying Yelp’s defense, and notes that many other small business owners who have filed a class-action lawsuit against the company don’t either. The case was dismissed, but is awaiting a decision in appeals court.
His article points to an NBC report from November about a dentist who claimed his negative reviews had been removed when he paid to advertise with the company, but reappeared when he told the company he no longer wanted to advertise.
Following Thomas’ article, The Seattle Times posted a letter to the editor from someone named Nete Olsen, who claimed, “I’ve also been extorted by the online reviews site,” and that the article “puts into words the exact experience that our business has gone through with the online review website.”
This week, the Times published another letter to the editor from Sollitto saying that both Thomas’ piece and Olsen’s letter “rehash a conspiracy theory that lacks evidence (see: Woozle effect).” He noted the Harvard study again.
“Yelp does not extort small businesses,” he continued. “We have been transparent with the fact that we do not recommend every review that is submitted. Why might a review not be recommended? It might be a fake, an unhelpful rant or rave, a review that the business owner asked a customer to write, or, simply, a review that was posted by someone we don’t know much about.”
“Let’s spend a moment on that last one,” he added. “We feel the most useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community — those who regularly return to the site to share their opinions, who engage with other members of the community and share more information about themselves. After all, whose opinion would you trust more: a friend who you know is an expert in that given area, or a faceless stranger just shouting out a drive-by suggestion?”
Image via Jeremy Stoppelman (Twitter)
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman addressed the topic in a reddit AMA in November, saying, “Despite the ‘Yelp extorts’ conspiracy meme, there’s never been a shred of actual ‘smoking gun’ evidence (phone call recording, email, etc.) to back up the claims.”
Yelp and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) have a new online reviews initiative, which will see even more events in various cities throughout the country this year, leading up to Small Business Week in May. We’d imagine that Yelp will face a few more unhappy businesses.
In a couple weeks, Yelp will release its Q4 and full year 2013 financial results, and will no doubt provide some stats on reviews and users. On the last one, they announced a 68% year-over-year increase in revenue and 42% year-over-year growth in cumulative reviews.
The extortion accusations are only one of the controversies Yelp continues to face. It also continues to battle fake reviews with “sting operations.” The company recently revealed that it has caught nearly 300 businesses engaging in fake reviews, resulting in their business pages displaying Yelp’s consumer alert messages.
Do you believe the “extortion meme” is a baseless conspiracy theory or do you think there’s a legitimate reason these accusations continue to fly? Share your thoughts in the comments.
You’re probably aware of multiple controversial issues surrounding Yelp reviews. There are several to choose from. You have some businesses accusing the company of holding positive reviews hostage (with advertising being the ransom). You have a court ordering Yelp to turn over the identities of anonymous Yelp reviewers. You have people paying other people to write fake reviews, whether it’s negative reviews for competitors or positive reviews for their own business.
Do you find Yelp to be a reliable source of information for consumers? Is your own business fairly portrayed? Ever suspected a review was a fake? Let us know in the comments.
These are all issues that Yelp has to deal with on an ongoing basis, and that consumers have to take into consideration every time they read a review on the site. The fake reviews are apparently so prevalent that the company is ramping up its efforts to combat them.
“Consumers, on average, can rely on the content they see on Yelp,” CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said on stage at LeWeb last year. Reassured?
In the fall of 2012, Yelp revealed a new system for combating fake reviews with its Consumer Alerts. Yelp shows warnings to users when they’ve found businesses that have paid for reviews. If you come across such a business listing, you’re greeted with a Consumer Alert, which explains that they’ve caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews.
Yelp doesn’t kick the business out of its service, but the embarrassing warning appears on the business listing for three months. Yelp has hoped that this would serve as a deterrent. Just how well it’s actually working remains a mystery. So far, Yelp has reportedly issued 285 of the alerts with more on the horizon.
Stoppleman was interviewed for an article this week by The Telegraph. He talked about how the company is conducting “sting operations,” where Yelpers pose at users willing to write paid reviews. It’s only been happening in the U.S. so far, but is about to be expanded into Europe.
“It has been incredibly successful in that we have been able to catch businesses red handed,” Stoppleman is quoted as saying of the sting operations.
But how successful has Yelp really been at spotting fake reviews? Catching people red-handed is one thing. How many are not being caught?
Yelp has certainly been using the law to go after paid reviews, but a lot of this has been happening well after the Consumer Alerts system was put in place. Last summer, Yelp sued BuyYelpReview.com, obviously for selling reviews (not the latest such suit filed by Yelp).
Apparently Yelp has busted quite a few businesses over the past year. It had already caught nine when it first launched the Consumer Alerts, then launched another round of them in August. With the number approaching 300, it would appear that the program, at least initially, did little to deter the practice (though Stoppleman told the Telegraph it’s “obviously a deterrent”).
“We’ve seen some pretty extreme chicanery in connection with these businesses, including people buying fake reviews, offering rewards or discounts for reviews or having a large number of reviews submitted from the same Internet Protocol (IP) address (a clue that someone may be trying to artificially inflate their rating),” said Yelp VP of Consumer & Mobile Products Eric Singley in August.
In September, a Harvard Business School study suggested that 16% of Yelp restaurant reviews are potentially fake.
Luther Lowe, director of public policy at Yelp, tells us that 16% figure is misleading, as “HBS used reviews Yelp identified as suspicious (not ‘fake’) to run [its] analysis. 25% suppressed not 16%.”
Yelp responded to the study, saying that the findings “shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.”
“As consumers increasingly turn to online reviews to find a local business, the incentive to artificially improve one’s reputation also increases,” the company said. “But neither should the fact that Yelp has been on guard against these very same reviews from our earliest days.”
It went on to talk up its controversial review filter.
That same month, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that nineteen companies agreed to stop writing fake Yelp reviews and pay over $350,000 of fines.
“Consumers rely on reviews from their peers to make daily purchasing decisions on anything from food and clothing to recreation and sightseeing,” he said. “This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution.”
“We think it’s great the New York Attorney General took action against these businesses that try to mislead consumers. In fact, we helped him,” said Yelp Senior Litigation Counsel Aaron Schur. “Because Yelp uses sophisticated software to filter reviews and weed out less reliable ones, we identify — and take action against — concerted campaigns to game the system quite frequently. As a result, we were able to give the NY AG’s office some solid leads on which businesses to go after.”
“And we have more,” he added. “We would love to work with law enforcement officials in other states to crack down on this unethical practice.”
Meanwhile, there are more reviews being posted to Yelp than ever. In the second half of 2013, Yelp added the ability to review businesses from its mobile apps. Earlier this month, Yelp boasted 47 million reviews, seemingly encouraging the saturation of the site with reviews by recognizing a guy who wrote 1,712 in 2013 alone. Perhaps more reviews means better odds of drowning out the fake ones.
At least Yelp isn’t eager to roll over on fake reviews without significant evidence. Despite being ordered to do so, Yelp has been resistant to handing over the names of anonymous users, whom a business alleges wrote fake negative reviews about it.
How bad is Yelp’s fake review problem? Do you think Yelp is doing a good job of keeping it under control? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Oakland Yelp user Victor G. received some recognition from Yelp for posting the most reviews of 2013 with a total of 1,712 during the year. That’s a lot of reviews (about five a day).
In all, he’s written over 7,000 reviews on the site. That’s out of the 47 million reviews it hosts.
“A Yelper since December 2007 and a member of the Elite Squad six years running, Victor G. has reviewed everything from gelaterias to thrift stores,” says Yelp VP of Community Management Andrea Rubin.
Rubin actually shared the top three Yelpers of the year, which included Victor G. at number one, followed by Kim N. and Kenneth N. of Mountain View and Vancouver respectively.
The company also shared the top ten most reviewed local businesses of the year, with Bottega Louie in Los Angeles taking the top spot.
“People voiced their opinions about this LA eatery in 2,193 recommended reviews over the course of the year, boosting Bottega Louie’s overall review count to more than 7,000 while maintaining an impressive 4-star rating,” says Rubin. “Though the portobello fries are clear crowd pleasers, Bottega Louie’s famous macarons take the cake, with mentions in 1,230 reviews!”
The top ten is as follows:
1. Bottega Louie, Los Angeles, CA
2. Phil’s BBQ, San Diego, CA
3. Bi-Rite Creamery, San Francisco, CA
4. Wurstküche, Los Angeles, CA
5. Pink’s Hot Dogs, Los Angeles, CA
6. Katz’s Delicatessen, New York, NY
7. Ippudo NY, New York, NY
8. Brenda’s French Soul Food, San Francisco, CA
9. The Halal Guys, New York, NY
10. Founding Farmers, Washington, DC
Update: AmazonFresh has now officially launched in San Francisco. You can browse here.
It looks like AmazonFresh, Amazon’s grocery delivery service, is expanding into its third city – San Francisco.
The service initially launched in Seattle a few years ago, but expanded into the Los Angeles area earlier this year. Soon, San Francisco residents will be able to order groceries online, and have them delivered to their home right from the Internet retail giant.
And no, these groceries will not be delivered by drones. At least not yet.
All Things D is reporting that a launch may come next week, and that AmazonFresh trucks have already been spotted in the area. As further confirmation, a job posting in October indicated a coming Bay Area launch for the service.
AmazonFresh provides Amazon Prime members with free same-day and early morning delivery on orders over $35 of more than 500,000 Amazon items, including fresh grocery and local products (including from restaurants).
We imagine that drones, robots and self-driving cars will eventually be doing a lot of the delivery for both services if everything goes according to plan.
This week, eBay announced the launch of some new personalization and curation features for the eBay Marketplace, and that it is expanding its efforts in local commerce, including the extension of its eBay Now delivery service into 25 new markets by the end of the year.
It has been about a year since eBay unveiled its Pinterest-like feed design, which it rolled out to users in February. Now, eBay is continuing in the Pinterest/Etsy-esque direction, launching five new specific features: Collections, Curators, Follow, Profiles and eBay Today.
Collections are described as groups of products that have ben handpicked by “expert curators, buyers and sellers.” Curators are “top trendsetters across a variety of interest areas, who create beautiful collections on eBy to help you easily connect you with items you’ll love.’
At least they didn’t say “tastemakers.”
The Follow feature lets eBay users personalize their feeds by following collections, curators or regular eBay users, as well as specific interests. The Profile is pretty basic. It applies to both buyers and sellers, and lets you share info about yourself, the collections you’ve created, your interests, and the people you follow.
Finally, eBay Today is a new page aimed at helping users discover “the very best collections of items” on eBay, selected by the company’s Chief Curator and Editorial Director Michael Phillips Moskowitz.
eBay has 200 curators including: Alexandra Cousteau, Andrea Linett, Ashley Avignon, Benjamin Clymer, Billy Farrell, Brian Walton, Cecilia Dean , Chris Benz, Chrissie Miller, Darcy Miller, Eddie Borgo, Graham Hill, Janie Bryant, Jauretsi, Jen Atkin, Jeremiah Brent, Jon Rose, Justin Bell, Kelly Oxford, Lucy Sykes, Pharrell Williams, Richard Rawlings, Ryan Block, Solange Knowles, Tenzin Wild, Todd Selby, Veronica Belmont, and Zem Joaquin.
eBay tells sellers, “This new experience puts great new tools in your hands for driving sales and developing loyal, repeat customers. You can use the new collections, following, and eBay profile to transform moments of inspiration into purchases of your great inventory. We’ll also be introducing new features and an exciting new look for your eBay Store. From bigger, bolder listing images to new ways to spotlight inventory and share on social media, subscribers will soon have even more tools available to them to turn browsers into buyers. All sellers will have this option by the end of January 2014! ”
I have to say, the discussion out there around these features from what I seen has basically consisted of tumbleweeds. One reader, however (commenting on this very article) makes an interesting point, saying, “The new Follow/Social Trending features on eBay are the silliest and most useless things to happen to date. Stop trying to make the web site something that it is not. eBay does not equal Facebook, Twitter, etc.”
Is eBay in fact trying to be something that it’s not? Must everything consist of social/follow features? Frankly, I personally don’t have a lot of use for them on a site like eBay, but perhaps a substantial amount of people do. It will be interesting to see how the enormous eBay community engages with these features over time. Will sellers really see a significant difference?
The local stuff, on the other hand, may just turn out to be huge for businesses and consumers alike. We’re talking rapid delivery of products, and it’s only the very early days of this roll-out.
eBay Now was first introduced a year ago. It lets shoppers have products from local stores delivered to them in an hour or less. As mentioned, it’s expanding into 25 new markets. It goes live in Chicago on Tuesday, and then in Dallas later this year. This will be followed by unspecified international markets, including London early next year.
eBay also plans to offer eBay Now same-day delivery for local goods on eBay.com in cities that have the service. eBay will also release scheduled delivery for eBay Now so that customers can buy something and pick an appropriate time to have it delivered to them.
In addition to that, eBay is letting shoppers order online and pick up products at local stores. This particular feature is live immediately for Toys ‘R’ Us and Best Buy, and will be for other retailers in the near future.
Finally, the company announced that it has acquired Shutl, a marketplace that utilizes a network of couriers to deliver local goods on the same day. The pick-up should help eBay its expansion efforts for eBay Now.
“The world is changing, with the lines between online and offline commerce blurring and the expectations of buyers and sellers rising rapidly,” said Devin Wenig, president of eBay Marketplaces. “With eBay’s latest steps, we are bringing together the best of what people need from a shopping experience – speed and convenience – with things people love about shopping, like discovery and inspiration.”
“eBay is a technology company; we understand that retailers, brands and sellers of all sizes need a new set of solutions to deliver the kinds of experiences consumers expect in today’s environment,” he said. “We’re making fundamental changes to our business that put us in a position to be the right partner for merchants and the best place for people to shop – anytime, anywhere and on any device.”
Are you an eBay seller? We’d love to hear your reaction to eBay’s announcements. If you’re not a seller, do any of the announcements make you want to reconsider? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Google has launched a new Google Places for Business Android app, which lets businesses keep their listings up-to-date across Google.
The app lets businesses update their info like hours, address, contact information, photos and description, and lets them post updates and photos so customers can see. It also lets them respond to comments and +1s on their posts.
The app includes insights to show businesses how customers are finding and interacting with them.
Businesses can use the app to manage multiple business locations.
Google does say that the app may not be useable for all accounts, but Google us updating business data over the coming months, so that should change in time.
