Dealing With Disappearing Yelp Reviews

Within the internet marketing sphere, unbiased opinions are important. Browsers of a website for a given service inherently understand that the people who run said business will be biased in their presentation – they’ll want to emphasize positives and downplay negatives, naturally. This makes impartial information on the product or services vital, and Yelp reviews are one great example.

Yelp reviews are one of the best ways to get an objective opinion on your online marketing site, and if you provide the services you say at the quality you claim, they’ll turn into a fantastic way to organically increase your views and conversions. At the same time, Yelp reviews can disappear, even if they’re positive – why does this happen? Let’s look at the reasons why reviews may disappear, and what you can do to help get you traffic from Yelp.

Yelp Filter

If you notice reviews disappearing from your site, it’s likely they’ve been caught by the Yelp Filter. This is an algorithm designed to remove fake or low-quality reviews, and it’s said to filter about 25 percent of all reviews. There are two primary goals of the filter:

1. Reviews are from real customers
2. Reviews are interesting and add value to the community

The filter uses several complex factors in this process, and updates daily. Approved reviews are listed in the “Recommended” section, which is easier to view on the page, while non-approved reviews are posted in the “not currently recommended” link, which is at the bottom of pages and tougher to find.

Algorithm Factors

There are five primary factors which may influence the Yelp Filter:

• Review from someone with no profile information
• Review from someone with only one prior written review
• Review is short or lacking basic detail
• Review is too strongly slanted positively or negatively
• Review is from a location outside where the business is located

Advertising With Yelp

Some might assume that their reviews are disappearing because they don’t advertise specifically with Yelp, but this is not the case. Advertisers are not given any special treatment, and are just as susceptible to zero-star ratings as non-advertisers. These claims are made by Yelp themselves, and backed by independent research.

If you’re looking for factors which you can control to some degree, there are a couple. Claiming your Yelp listing is a big one, as is optimizing business keywords to get the proper reviews. Remember that Yelp results also typically come up near the top of Google search results for local businesses, so there’s a lot of hay to be made here with the right strategy.

Want to learn more about Yelp reviews, or any other element of our search engine marketing solutions. The experts at SEO Werkz are standing by.