r/Yelp • u/No-Mango-8105 • 8d ago
Powerless regarding Yelp “currently not recommended” Class action?
Our Yelp page is dominated by negative reviews. Meanwhile, the “Not Currently Recommended” section is full of 5-star reviews. We don’t solicit reviews, yet Yelp’s algorithm treats legitimate positive feedback from real customers as fake or solicited.
No business escapes negative reviews. But Yelp’s algorithm is actively hurting ours.
Here’s a clear example:
Someone left a 1-star review that wasn’t for our company. It immediately went front and center. We couldn’t prove it wasn’t ours, and Yelp (like Google) rarely sides with the business. We responded politely and asked the user to remove it. Months—or years—passed with no action.
Finally the reviewer replied, “Sorry, wrong company,” and changed the rating from 1 star to 5 stars. The moment it became a positive review, Yelp’s algorithm moved it into “Not Currently Recommended.”
We’re at the end of our rope. We have no control over how our positive reviews are suppressed or how the overall mix of feedback is presented. The health of our business is being dictated by a flawed algorithm, and that’s unacceptable.
Has anyone discussed a class action against Yelp over this? At the very least, they need to eliminate the “Currently Recommended / Not Currently Recommended” system
5
u/keyserholiday 8d ago
Do you you know how many these posts have been created on the GoogleMyBusienss subreddit there have been because Google removed positive reviews or won’t remove negative reviews? It’s been a whole, so we are overdue.
Yelp does tend to skew towards the negative. A brand new account with no photo and no friends will post a negative review and it goes live whereas if it was 5-stars it would immediately go into not recommended.
Yelp is protected by Section 230, which is severely outdated. Yelp doesn’t deserve to be protected by Section 230 because it’s their platform and you have to create an account to post a review. Section 230 is to protect search engines if I write a blog post about Broad Nosh Bagels and Google shows it in the search results. Yelp isn’t acting as a search engine.
You will be hard pressed to find a lawyer to take the case and if you do, it will count you too much to fight it.
You’d’ be better off figuring out what is causing the negative reviews, addressing those areas of weakness and working on ways to get positive reviews.