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!!!!!!
