Our business has earned a considerable amount of money from the internet and somewhat because of Yelp, the online review website. Initially, we got a review from a client in summer of 2009 and the reviews all seemed to build organically. After a while, we had a number of five star reviews and slowly they would disappear. After some research I realized that Yelp has an extremely proprietary filtering mechanism on the website so that only influential reviewers gain traction.

Soliciting fake reviews is not honorable and we have never asked non-customers or friends to review our business. At the same time, when you have a customer who is sending you multiple e-mails about their enthusiasm for your work, then I feel that it is completely honest to ask them to let the world know online. Over the past few years we have made this attempt with Yelp and watched the number of reviews dwindle almost even faster.

The final straw for my efforts with Yelp happened approximately three weeks ago when I was contacted by a Yelp ad sales person. I mentioned that the reason that I wasn’t interested was because Yelp’s filtering monster continues to eliminate all positive reviews and it is so insulting that it only makes you care about service to avoid bad reviews, which seem to have considerable sticking power. The discussion went onward with continued pressure from the salesperson until I hung up on her. Reading this article will fill you in on the process. Since emailing Yelp requesting that I no longer get sales solicitation we have lost an additional two reviews. For a process that is supposed to be autonomous I find this very strange and a search on Inc. magazine revealed Yelp indeed is a monster to fight with an iron fist if you are a service-based business owner. Let’s face it Yelp is a secondary tool for locating service providers and verifying them compared to our next contender… Ding, ding, ding!

You’ve read the title, so you know where I am going… Google. If you’re reading this then you know Google places loves to accumulate reviews on your business and it only requires that the user have a Google account, which almost anyone with a computer does have these days.

• Google doesn’t filter the reviews
• Google searches show your reviews when appear during a search
• Customers who have a Google account simply have to type and hit enter. Done!
• Google is profitable and is such a brand that they have the verb “Google” in Websters dictionary, so they’re not going anywhere. I wonder about Yelp.

The internet has revolutionized the world for even contractors. The likelihood of getting reviews and dealing with them will be inevitable for all businesses. To strengthen your presence online, I recommend you work hard to ask enthusiastic and REAL customers to put their time into reviews on Google places because the efforts on Yelp are a waste of their time.

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