Yelp Yelp reviews are not to be trusted! San Francisco California
Our company Okey DoKey Locksmith Houston was working with Yelp since 2017 and we used to pay around 350$ every month for advertisment with them. During the first year we got many reviews from authentic customers and most of them was accepted by Yelp and we built a great reputation and was able to service their customers.
After a year our website got some good ranking online when looking for keywords like locksmith, lock rekey, key replacement and more and was actually better then Yelp itself and then the problem started.
Every week Yelp remove reviews from our page in the attempt to harm our reputation and our rating and from around 60 reviews we got only 25 left, so we decided to disconnect from them and use other more beneficial advertising channels.
From the day we disconnect and stop the payment Yelp started to remove the last 25 review about 1 a day until we left with no valid review. They also tried to call and convince us to pay again, explaining that we should not ask customers for reviews and all kind of weird other practices they have.
Making customers happy and asking for reviews is integral part of our work, reputation building, return customers and seo plan and Yelp is just holding a monopoly and engaging in anti-competitive practices to try and put our ranking down.
I suggest other company to never pay anything for yelp, because one day if you will pass them in the search, they will take your reviews down and you will ends up throuwing your money away.