Yelp Sucks!!!!

Hi everyone!!

This is my rant blog posting.     I will get back to posting positive great news about custom swim platforms and SeaDek soonly.

Here is some information that you might find interesting.       Basically, Yelp sucks.    I don’t trust any Yelp reviews anymore.    

Essentially, They only post reviews from “Yelpers”…that is a person who has previously written at least 5 Yelp reviews.   Therefore, as you can imagine, these Yelpers are most likely mean, nasty, sad, lonely people who revel in trying to bring others down to their ugly existence by writing viral reviews of every company that they can.   I can just picture in my mind….Karen, my ex neighbor, smiling and laughing to herself (because she was a lonely, nasty, ugly woman) as she posts a 1 star review of a restaurant because the poor waitress that had to serve her was not fast enough….or friendly enough…..or subservient enough; and seriously feeling good about herself because she got even with that stupid restaurant.

The Yelp filter algorithm is complicated and unfair for many small business’.   At a glance, it highlights only those reviews by “Yelpers”.    Others, including the ones that your excellent customers wrote, are hidden, not recommended.    Because they aren’t Yelpers.    And technically, Yelp even prohibits you from requesting your customers write positive comments, even if they are valid positive reviews!   They consider that trying to bias the system and they believe that their system presents an unbiased view of a business.    Turns out this is completely convoluted.    I’m not a Yelper….but I’m guessing that most people who use Yelp, go to the Yelp reviews and use the star system to decide whether they are going to use that business.   So if a small business has one “valid” review, and it happens to be a 1 star negative review, then it could sway people to avoid this business, when in fact the business does a great job.

How do I know this?     I did my research after, in fact, I had several people ask me about a negative review that supposedly was on Yelp.   It turns out it was written by a customer, Gordon H.,  who had been a customer for 8 years!    He had brought his boat to me every year, year after year, for mechanical, detailing, gelcoat work and winter storage.    We must have done something right for him to come back every year.    So after doing my research, I first began asking my customers who made positive comments to me about their experience (essentially all :)), to write reviews thinking that I could just bump down the negative one to the bottom and increasing the star rating by adding many positive ratings.    After noticing that those reviews were being “hidden” or “not recommended”….I contacted Yelp directly and inquired why?   Thus the explanation above.    So I contacted this customer….Gordon H. directly and found out that essentially he had had a nasty personal life problem at the time and basically took it out on me.    Seen it before :(.    I asked him to consider removing the review and he agreed. 

So now I have no active reviews and 5 “hidden”, positive reviews.    What a F*^&^%&%d up system.    And now Yelp is asking me to give them $ to advertise on Yelp.    Yeah, good luck with that.    And Yelp….if you try to contact me to attempt to hide this review?????    I’ve added filters to prevent you from doing that!    BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!