Yelp recently busted what it calls a "review-swapping ring," in which partners in a business networking group posted top ratings and glowingly positive reviews of each other's services.
Starting in February, the business association agreed to hold a contest in which members would score points and prizes for pumping up each other's ratings and reviews on Yelp. A few months later, the effort expanded, with businesses actively soliciting Yelp reviews via Facebook and LinkedIn. The net result is that, for example, a small-claims paralegal service in Los Angeles quickly boasted 15 five-star reviews, all from fellow members of the networking group.
"This was a sophisticated effort to bolster the reputation of members of this business networking group through five-star reviews," said David Lee, Yelp's user operations manager. "Reviews that have a bias lead to a poor consumer experience."
The business owners involved claim that all of the reviews they received and gave were legitimate, even though no one revealed their network affiliation in reviews, and the group's president admitted in an email that "we were all part of a networking organization."
Yelp caught on to the networking group's actions, and last month dozens of comments and five-star ratings affiliated with the group instantly disappeared.
Yelp would point to the incident as an example in which its filtering and investigative services worked to perfection. The dubious comments and reviews were outed, and in light of how the controversy played out consumers should have just as much, if not more, confidence in its ratings system.
Article content courtesy of Time.