This was actually brought up on Bloomberg recently, when a business owner and a representative from Yelp each presented their side of the story. In that, Yelp’s Vincent Sollitto, VP of corporate communications, said: “Yelp has to recommend reviews that they find reliable. The reason that there are a number of positive reviews for Beverly’s [the aforementioned business owner] 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, who runs a dog training service, responded, “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.”
Unless Bloomberg cut it out, Sollitto didn’t really acknowledge her comments about people legitimately using the same IP address.
“Don’t Ask for Reviews” is one of Yelp’s guidelines. They have a whole page on it in their support center.