In its recent report on "Yelp's Rocky Relationship with Small Businesses," PBS Media Shift was the latest mainstream media outlet to cover one of the most controversial topics in all of local search: search engines' filtering of customer reviews.
The topic first came to prominence four years ago in Kathleen Richards' landmark piece on Yelp's aggressive sales pitches -- or extortion, depending on your perspective and whom you believe. While I was never fully convinced of corporate misbehavior on Yelp's part, the company hasn't done itself any favors by continuing to allow its field operatives to use deceptive sales tactics. Despite its best efforts to educate both business owners and everyday users of the site, the poor reputation of Yelp's salespeople continues to contribute to confusion around review filtering among the small business community. I hope to be able to clear up some of that confusion with this post and offer a few tactical tips to help avoid the frustration these filters can cause.
Why review filters exist
As local search usage among the general public has exploded over the last several years, more and more directories have (rightly) seen reviews as a way to:
- Gauge the offline popularity of a business in their algorithms
- Provide better insight to searchers into the experience at that business
- Increase the "stickiness" of their sites by increasing the sense of community
- Get out of Google's Panda/Farmer purgatory by adding unique user content
In many ways, Yelp was ahead of its time on all four of these bullet points, and as a result, it had to tackle the inevitable review spam that accompanied its popularity.
Its answer was arguably the first widespread local review filter: an algorithm for detecting and removing spam or suspicious-looking content.
For those of you who couldn't quite keep up with Yelp's version of Micro Machines man, the primary reasons are:
- To make sure reviews are left by actual people (not robots)
- To make sure reviews are left by customers and not just hired third parties
- To make sure businesses don't leave reviews of themselves
Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, recently gave his own slower version of this rationale in a company-produced video:
How review filters work
While I don't have any detailed knowledge of Yelp's review filter specifically, many comparable filters seem to kick into action if any of the following is present in the content of the review:
- Use of extreme adjectives or profanity in the review
- Over-use of keywords in the review
- Inclusion of links in the review
Another criterion that also tends to trigger filtering is a sudden burst of reviews preceded by or followed by a long lull between them.
Some of the more sophisticated review filters, including Yelp's, take a look at user characteristics, too, including:
- Total number of reviews a user has left on the site
- Distribution of ratings across all of a user's reviews
- Distribution of business types among all of a user's reviews
- Frequency of reviews that a user has left on the site
- IP address(es) of the user when leaving reviews
The bottom line is that reviews written by active users have an astronomically-higher likelihood of "sticking" on a local search engine than those written by first-time or infrequent reviewers. And even beyond their stickiness, many local search experts (including myself) speculate that reviews left by active users also influence rankings to a much greater extent than those left by first-time or infrequent reviewers.
Problems with review filters
“I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews”by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blumenthals.com
The algorithms behind review filters are far from perfect, as many readers probably know, and Yelp is far from the only local search engine with a review filter. In fact, Google+ has probably accrued more ire from business owners as a result of its filter in 2012 and 2013 than any other site.
Unfortunately, these filters frequently:
- Lead to less-informed consumer decisions about the experience at a business
- Remove legitimate reviews, especially from less-sophisticated, less-active customers
- Discourage new users from leaving reviews
All of which leads to frustration from the standpoint of a small business owner.
Avoiding review filters
Yelp is probably the most aggressive of its peers at enforcing its business review guidelines, which also happen to be the most onerous guidelines of any local search engine. Yelp's filtering is so aggressive that one in five reviews written on Yelp never shows up on the site!
To sum up those guidelines:
- Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
- Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
- Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
O ye business owner who disobeys those guidelines, beware! You run the risk of a public shaming.
Although Yelp's guidelines are considerably more onerous than its peers', Google+ is not far behind in stringency. However, many local search engines are far less prickly about soliciting reviews from customers, or even incentivizing them, and some (including Google) have even engaged in this behavior themselves.
For those who have been caught in the Google+ review filter, Mike Blumenthal has covered your travails par excellence and has authored a most reasonable response. Miriam Ellis and Joy Hawkins have also given excellent advice on this front.
Review guidelines at major local search engines
Here are direct links to those guidelines at a few of the biggest players:
- Google+ Local
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- Yahoo
- Citysearch
- YellowPages.com
- UrbanSpoon
- TripAdvisor
- Facebook (Guidelines for Page Promotion; to my knowledge, guidelines for reviews have not yet been released by Facebook.)
The review filters of the future
While the search engines may throttle their level of filtering from time to time, the review filter is a local search institution that is here to stay.
The primary methods of these filters, though, I think will change pretty dramatically. Rather than judging a review by its content or looking at website behavior (e.g. how many reviews a user has left for other businesses), the explosion in smartphone adoption is enabling a couple of far less easily-manipulated criteria to judge the veracity of a review.
- Any local search platform operated by a handset maker (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, ...Amazon?) could register the device ID at the time of review and tie it to a bonafide human being.
- Any local search platform that has implemented mobile payment processing (Google, Apple, ...Amazon?, any Square/PayPalHere partner) could disable the ability for a user to leave a review of a retail-category business unless he/she had completed a transaction at the storefront.
And even for those platforms without the handset or payment-processing advantage, requiring location-awareness for users of mobile applications prior to leaving a review seems like a no-brainer (which Yelp has already implemented and Google may be well on its way to doing).
For those sites that are more desktop-dependent, widespread adoption of primary social logins (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could lead to a baked-in layer of spam-fighting.
As Eric Schmidt recently said:
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
In some industries (e.g., DUI law, plastic surgery, psychology), anonymity may be a pre-requisite for any user reviews and these local search platforms may need a Plan B. But for most industries, requiring some sort of verified social profile would solve a lot of problems.
Facebook, of course, has a huge leg up on everyone else based on its knowledge of a user's social connections. Google+, meanwhile, could look at a user's activity across Google's entire range of products (web search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) to stop spammers in their tracks.
While consumer privacy concerns around these mechanisms for review filtering may arise, many business owners would likely rejoice at a truer, less bug-ridden filtering algorithm and a more accurate and complete representation of their customers' experience.
Well, that's enough out of me for this week! How about you? What are some of your strategies for avoiding these dreaded review filters? What other methods of filtering do you see coming to Local Search?
I am all for getting rid of the spam and purchased reviews but Yelp has removed many legit reviews because their process is so stringent. The best we can do is to continue to educate our clients to be a bit more active and provide real reviews across a spectrum of business' so they are not seen as a one-time wonders and their review removed. Good post David.
You are right David. I think these filtering process come into for removing the spam reviews and want to check that is there any funny work involve in that. :)
Well thanks for sharing that.
Amir
Yep agreed. Send your clients this article. They'll 'get it' then. What we all need to remember is these sites like Google Places and Yelp are built for users first and small businesses second. 1 in 5 reviews filtered is probably the norm (actually not as bad as I thought). That should still not keep a small business owner from asking for reviews (4 out 5 is better then zero out of 5). If you don't take the shot you can't get the goal! Now to keep Yelp happy... mention that you are on Yelp and appreciate all the reviews you get from customers... hint, hint, wink, wink. ;)
Absolutely right Anita! Avoiding spammy business reviews is very important for local search engines to help users get the natural and true user opinions. Certainly Google+ has taken steps towards it. Spammy reviews or deceiving users to get good reviews can be little difficult to find for the bots or the software. Companies should hire people to find and negate these spammy business reviews but it also is a humongous and tedious task.
Great information David. Local reviews are always a sticky wicket. We have found that offering customers a range of choices to leave reviews makes it easy for them to leave a review on a local review site they already use (have an established profile on) making it easy for them to leave the review since no sign-up before leaving review is required and they already understand the review process as they have left reviews for other businesses on that site before, and most importantly, since they have left other reviews on that local review site, their reviews on that site are less likely to be filtered.
The last thing a business owner wants to do is force customers that want to review their business to sign up for a local review site that they don't currently use, have them take the time to leave a review and then have their review get filtered. This scenario is both frustrating for the customer and especially for the business owner.
Offering a range of review venue choices provides review diversification which helps limit risk of loss of reviews or at least ALL reviews. LinkedIn is an often overlooked, but great platform for B2B recommendations, both for individuals and businesses and for certain prospects, as they carrie a lot of weight and based on the nature of the network, rarely (if ever) filters recommendations from other users.
Thanks for sharing.
Over the last nearly two decades we have watched search engines evolve to greater capability to interpret human natural language ("searcher intent") that is of course by nature a very messy realm. Now we're branching into attempts to interpret human natural behavior ("social affinity/proximity"), image-matching (Google image search by icon), and a growing number of dimensions of human endeavor. Rick, your observation of the natural preference for persons to spread their reviews shallow and wide by natural peripatetic business associations just emphasizes how difficult it's going to be for Google, et al, to reach better-than-50/50 validations.
I wonder if the search companies would be better off declaring a trial period while they allow more public participation in experimentation. "Just say no" any time a search service does not exactly understand a review's validity seems simplistic and self-defeating.
Rick has hit the nail on the head. You must give your customers a lot of different options, so they can post on the site they are most familiar and use. That is THE best way of getting your reviews to stick.
I also love the idea of LinkedIn recommendations. Great little golden nugget
I think the overall issue is that businesses still don't' understand what a "review" is and just how important it is to them and their business. They're afraid of failing and they shouldn't be.
Business owners are generally afraid of getting negative reviews, as they think that getting negative review will hurt their business.
I believe that you can use negative reviews for these things:
If you want to be successful marketeer, you should be ready to cope with both positive and negative things.
I remember a local cable company who made a huge mess one day (channels were missing for a lot of users I think) and there were tons of people complaining on their social media websites. The cable company started erasing negative comments. People realized that and it went out of control... They lost a ton of customers that day.
So yeah I agree with you. Get ready to take the heat. Use negative comments as quality control/feedback and work on improving.
Great article David (as always). As other have said (including yourself), there is a fine line between filtering illegitimate/spam reviews and filtering out legitimate, hard earned reviews. Since the local space is heavily dependent on reviews I can sympathize with companies like Google and Yelp to a point. But only to a point. Particularly Google with the way their recent algo changes have helped large brands, coupling that with a stringent review policy only makes it harder for local business to exist in web 2.5. I spend a large part of my time trying to figure out processes to help SMB's get reviews while at the same time not running afoul of Yelp and Google. I want to clearly state that we do not engage in the following practice, but getting Yelp elite status is not hard if you actually focus on it (I have a large group of foodie friends who are all Yelp elite) and I would hate to see the industry move in a direction where SEO's had large cadre of Yelp elite members to leave reviews.
Totally agree with your last point Dan. Too much power in too few hands is a recipe for disaster. The beauty of the internet is that everyone gets a voice, but if some are then deemed to be more equal than others.....not good.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately it seems like the tide is starting to turn in favor of being a bigger brand (whether it be a traditional brand, or a personal brand i,e, Yelp elite member, a high Authorship rating etc) and away from allowing everyone to have a say. At least in terms of web marketing. While authority and trust are key components that users/potential consumers are looking for so is the "diamond in the rough"
one way to make the most of good social platform reviews/testimonials is take screenshots of positive messages.
a brand could then make shots individual tweets, pictures, as well as construct a testimonial page of screen shots..
(getting the url is especially good; the customer can then verify the validity/identity of screen-shotted customers to strengthen gravity of endorsement.
thanks for the information here. see you peoples at #mozcon :)
Really like this idea, you earned my upped thumb.
Screenshots are a good idea. Sometimes the reviews, whether on Yelp or G+, get published before the filter kicks in; I have advised my clients to copy them, and if they disappear, to use them as on-site testimonials. Screenshot would help document those ephemeral reviews.
Thanks I like the idea.
Yikes - I didn't realize Yelp was that aggressive against reviews. So basically if I ask my customers to post a review on Yelp, it may get pulled because that person doesn't frequently post reviews of other businesses on Yelp. Can these people make it any harder for legitimate small businesses to get found?
I appreciate the detail of this article, thank you. I know an SEM provider whose client owns a restaurant, and the restaurant owner implemented a great strategy to get legitimate reviews on their Google Local page. As customers were leaving, they asked them to write a review on a PC they had at their location before they walked out. They got hundreds of legitimate reviews when customers logged into their own accounts (you probably already know what happened) and gave them stellar reviews about their dining experience! Well, of course Google flagged the account, saying too many reviews came from the same IP address and then wiped them all out. I believe this is yet another flaw in Google's algorithm, whereby a business owner has done everything right, including servicing their customers well, but all of their hard work is removed because of a single IP address concern. Variety is the best policy when it comes to social media reviews and citation backlinks. It may take time to get the best rankings on your primary site because we now need these types of credentials and unique off-site content, but it beats letting any search engine take down your business because they can't tell the real ones from the fake ones.
It seems getting reviews from active Yelp users is the only sure way to avoid filters. I'm not sure the solicitation of the reviews matters (not to the robot anyway). If you asked a random person to review you that doesn't use Yelp and may not even have an account you are sure to be filtered. The person is most likely going to sign up and first thing search for your business and leave a gleaming review. This would be an obvious red flag. Now if that same person you asked to review you uses Yelp often, owned an account for over a year, reviewed a few businesses in the past some good some bad, and may even have a list of favorite bars then you are in luck. In this way there is no real way to fake the system. The only way I can think of is to track down and solicit active users on Yelp which I'm sure would lead to someone reporting you quickly and you losing everything anyway!
Kudos for such a great insight. Many a times legit reviews are mistaken as spam and this is quite frustating.
This article is well explained, thank you very much for the information, it is one of the most relevant that I could find
To sum up Google's policies regarding reviews:
We're all aware of when Google recently announced that they will be bringing back reviews that were inadvertently removed by their filters, but I think you're right, David. They'll be looking at increasingly more factors, including activity by accounts on their product suite as a whole, in determining whether reviews are spam or not.
Great article, and an awesome explanation for why review filters are necessary. While Yelp has a slick explanation for their review filter, do you really feel like their current reviews reflect that? A lot of business addresses/phone numbers listed on Yelp are outdated, and the validity of the reviews is still questionable. I agree that Yelp attempted to make their data more accurate, but do you honestly feel they succeeded? The entire point of Yelp is to help people find quality restaurants and businesses around them. With Yelp's current data set, could a user accomplish that?
I hadn't noticed that article about outing the 8 businesses that is edgy and i don't want to say funny but fair is fair.
Really interesting and loved also a presentation made by our friend @Darrenshaw from Whitespark on Slideshare. However when I look to sophisticated review filters mentiones such like IP address I don't think they're really strong enough as we may use proxies and different personas.. I love the way France approach the problem by asking reviewers to present a receipt or any code proving they've bought goods from company they're reviewing. I know this may be little bit complicated but at least an invoice number customer id whatever will make fake reviews obvious. Thanks for your insights and hope to meet you soon.
HI David: Great article as always. I believe that the next big filter we're going to see will have to do with recency. When you see hotels with thousands of reviews, they quickly become irrelevant. The only reviews that really matter are the most recent reviews. "What have you done recently?" Generating positive reviews will be based on providing exceptional service day after day. I don't think it will be too long before we start to see reviews from last year disappear ... and depending on the industry, they could start disappearing if they're more than 3 months old. What say you?
Great Point David, I had a Yelp Business account for 1 year that gave us around 1 client a month and every client left a review about our services. However in the past anyone could just leave a positive review and make it look like your the best company for the job.
There salespeople are rubbish to be quite frank, they use words and promises that you should never tell or promise a potential client. We only signed up to Yelp now Hibu for local listings for our local clients.
For me they are not well trained to provide these types of services. Thanks David
Great post, thanks a lot, really I was looking for some tips connected with local optimizaiton. Hope it will be beneficial for my clients who gets local business
Great topic and insight. I must say the experience that we and our clients have had with Yelp has been extremely poor. When trying discuss issues with reviews or other related problems with Yelp for clients, or when we have clients contact them directly, the response is always a strong sales push to sell their services rather than to focus on maintaining quality reviews and to be responsive to users with legitimate concerns.
Ahh I love this post. In local business review is a strong point. Actually many seo companies are posting fake reviews about the product. Really Yelp done a great job to stop such spam or fake reviews.
David, thank you for the thoughtful post on the nature of the reviews landscape, particularly with Yelp. Watching their promotional video as well as the interview, reminds why there needs to be a filter in place, however, it doesn't need to be as strict as Yelp's and it can actually effect the positive reviews that should be there.
In terms of tactics, for our clients, we simply encourage them to have systems in place for customers to leave reviews but definitely "let them do it"! Otherwise, it's going to look suspicious. It's also far more genuine to let customers leave reviews from their own location, in their own time.
I especially enjoyed the cartoon!
I think we need filters to keep reviews genuine, I work for a ecommerce review collection company and we ask for the order numbers to verify the customer. There are various ways you can verify a local customers using geo tags from mobile phones.
Thanks for the great insights here. I appreciate that they are trying to make sure the reviews are legit, but I have to say it's frustrating when I see the # of my reviews decrease...when I know those reviews are real. I think one issue is lack of activity on the reviewer's account, and many times that happens just because people change their email addresses.
LOL on the speed of that first video. I had seen that video a while back, and then I think I rewatched it to try to get the rest of the info.
David,
Loving all of this great content for local businesses. Keep it coming.
Thank you again.
Thumbs up from me David - good piece. I'm increasingly disillusioned with review sites as they have become the spamming grounds and have of necessity therefore locked down their reviews.
The consequence of this as you point out, is that people like me who infrequently take to a review site to leave fulsome praise for a business I have dealt with are probably filtered out of the visible reviews for that business. Suddenly my voice is irrelevant because I don't often praise businesses? I was brought up in an era where praise was earned and not some cheap currency to be thrown out with every till receipt. If you tie it into transactions at the point of sale and don't allow people to reflect or even consume the product they have bought then the reviews are meaningless.
From an SEO perspective we avoid these sites; they are simply not worth it and if the filtering is as strong as you suggest then what we are seeing is at best a subjective view and therefore, by definition, untrustworthy.
My advice for customers seeking local search prominence? Pretend the internet was never invented, then create a sustainable Marketing plan. When you've done that then we can talk about the digital channels to help you get there, not the other way round.
I've had reviews filtered by Yelp before... pretty shady if you ask me, and there's no review process that I can find.
simply and effectively explanation in animated video... I agree about reviews are most important for your business or services.. But avoiding negative SEO effect, search engine have to take action to prevent Jenine reputed business or service provider.
Man, I didn't realize how aggressive Yelp's filtering process was. Though I'm sure most users appreciate it (and probably never even give it a second thought), the negative impact it can have on small business owners is severe.
It almost seems like the system skews towards featuring only mediocre reviews. I just Yelped my favorite independent coffee shop to glance at the filtered reviews and I'm honestly having trouble figuring out why most of them are filtered...They look like legitimate reviews (especially since I know the place very well), but they're just highly positive or highly negative in nature...
Having a filter so stringent almost defeats the purpose of the site itself.
Thanks for an interesting post!
Reviews are really very helpful to getting improvement local search result. Potential customers always expect to find right match info about the business. It’s all are possible if you have good reviews.