Do you want to get more positive reviews about your business on Yelp?

Want to learn more about Yelp recommendation software ? Why are your yelp reviews ‘NOT RECOMMENDED’

 

Are you looking for a way to get rid of a negative review on Yelp.  

The below blog post will answer all your concerns. Hope you find it useful. Please share it if so.

Why Yelp Filters out 25% Of All Reviews

Yelp has an automated recommendation software in place which is programmed to highlight the most useful and reliable content to consumers and site visitors.

“Our stance is quality over quantity and we currently recommend about 75 percent of the reviews that are submitted. This means about 25 percent of the reviews submitted to Yelp are not published on a business’ listing or recommended to consumers.”

 

WHY ARE MY REVIEWS NOT RECOMMENDED ON YELP?

There are several reasons for the review not being recommended. 

• The Reviewer Does Not Have a Complete Profile
• The Reviewer Does Not Have Social Integration
• The Reviewer Has Only Positive Reviews and hence fictitious
• The Review Was Submitted from an IP Located Somewhere Other Than the Business Location.
• The Reviews Are Originating from the Same Computer and hence same IP tracked.
• Reviewers Do Not Have Useful or Funny Marks on Their Other Reviews
• The Reviewer Does Not Have Yelp Friends
• The Reviewer has violate TOS (Terms of service) - example shown below.
• The Reviewer is a beginner and infrequent contributor in Yelp.

The reviews that are not currently recommended can still be viewed on a separate page but do not factor into a business’ overall star rating.

HOW TO GET YOUR REVIEWS RELEASED FROM NOT RECOMMENDED ON YELP?

The following tactic that can help a company get more positive reviews to appear on its Yelp profile. The most rewarding part of this tactic, is that the positive reviews have already been left for businesses by their customers or clients or patients - all a business has to do is to put an extra effort to make it visible.  After all, a real positive review matters to the business and should be shown to the people visiting Yelp. 

STEP 1: - FINDING YOUR FILTERED (NOT RECOMMENDED) REVIEWS

If you scroll down to just below the reviews listed on your profiles you will see a clickable link that says “(x) other reviews that are not currently recommended.” Click on that link and you will be able to see the reviews that have been left for your business that are caught in there filters and not recommended. 

Once you click on the link you will see the list of filtered reviews, it looks like this.

As you look through the filtered reviews you will obviously want to choose good reviews to free from the filter such as the examples above. Once you find a good review, simply copy and paste the first few lines of the review into Google, if you cannot find it right away, add parenthesis around the text.

If you are not able to find the reviews, try using a different sentence or two from the review to look for it. If that still does not work, you can try to search for the user profile on Yelp. Some reviews take a little extra work to locate but it is definitely worth it. 

As you will notice above, there are three buttons below the review, useful, funny and cool. According to Yelp’s algorithm of its review software, the company aims to show “useful” reviews.

For better understanding regarding this watch out this video.

STEP 2:-  Getting “Votes” for your  Positive Reviews 

In order to get your positive review released from the filter, you will need to get people to vote your review as “useful,” and for the sake of appearing true, a few “funny” and “cool” votes won’t hurt anything either. The problem is you might not be able to get a lot of people to take the time to follow the above steps and vote for reviews other people have left for your business, but if you can, you can remove your review from the filter.

Regardless of how you choose to get votes for your reviews, there are three elements critical to getting them released.

1. The votes need to come from unique IP addresses (not same computer).

2. The votes need to be spread out over several days to avoid looking fictitious.

3. Getting some votes from people with active Yelp profiles is very helpful. 

CAN I DO ANYTHING TO REMOVE A NEGATIVE REVIEW ON YELP? 

  

1. The easiest way is to have the pissed of customer remove their negative review.

This might not always be possible but this should be your first step to remove a negative review.  Make an offline conversation with your customer or patient. Address their issue and if possible provide them with an explanation for his disappointment. You may also want to offer something extra as a gesture of good faith - like a free dessert on next visit (for restaurants) or a free dental kit (for dentists)

All they need to do is log back onto yelp and hit the “remove” or “delete” button under their own review.

2. TOS Violations

Every review site has something they call their TOS or Terms Of Service. This is where they list all the things they allow and don’t allow in their reviews.

If a review is a personal attack on an employee, defamatory, derogatory or attacks a person based on disability, race, ethnicity, religion or other factors, you can have their reviews removed.  

If for an example where someone says, “our fat server” is generally enough to have a review removed for TOS violations, even though they are not pointing at a specific individual.  Also look at the following example.

Always mention that you “believe” it is a Terms Of Service violation when you report the review.  In many review sites they use an automated support processes called a ticketing system, and that system is programmed to first review an incoming contact for certain words.  If it find words like TOS in your message, it is likely to send that review to someone who deals with TOS violations directly.  This improves your chances of having a review removed.

An example:

Joe Smith was working for us for the past 3 months.  She left this review right on  the day that she was let go. This review is nothing more than ex-employee vengeance and I believe is against the Yelp! Terms of Service

3. Reply if nothing of the above works.

If you cannot have a review removed by the reviewer or for TOS, then replying may be your only other option.

1. If the reviewer sounds like a whiner, completely unreasonable or says something that makes them seem stupid, don’t reply.  People will get it and ignore their review. 
2. If you have proof that the review is false, post it in a way that seems factual and not emotional.

I hope this blog gave you many useful tips on getting more positive reviews on Yelp. I also discussed how you can get rid of negative reviews that can hamper your reputaion online.

If you found this blog useful, do not forget to share with others.  Let us pass on the information so more businesses can benefit from the information.

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You can also refer to our Additional reference: -  http://ibisinfotech.com/blog/how-important-are-patient-reviews-for-your-dental-practice-collecting-on-right-sites

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