I have a small business that is facing it right now. I either pay the Yelp tax or they have taken our community-created page with all 5-star reviews completely off the site. Can still find it from Google search, but can't find it from search within Yelp. And if you search for us, they show our competitor as a search result.
Got a call from Yelp sales guy about an offer 'that expires this week', just the day after our listing could not be found.
Now, I can't tell you my business name, because they will bury it even further. Yelp is as shady as it gets on the internet.
PM me and I'm happy to tell you who I am after I confirm who you are.
There is only one page. The community-created one. As a business, we never created one.
If you google "yelp $business", you can find this page today.
If you go to yelp.com and search for "$business", it used to be there. But, in the last week, it was taken off the search results and now a competitor is shown as a search result instead.
Going back to the users is not feasible for us, because we don't know who they are! They are some of our customers who felt the service was great enough to leave glowing reviews. We didn't solicit it.
What actions to take is an interesting discussion for us. Ethics aside, we just might cave and pay the Yelp mafia tax, as a cost of doing business. Which is what they want. And we want to get on with our business.
When you mean google "yelp $business" is $business like "chinese restaurante" or the actual name?
All pages are "community created", you can try to recreate the page if your page is gone, you go to "Write a review", search for it and then "Add a Business"
Of course you might pay, or take them to court as well
I'm not generally a distrustful person, panda888 - but how come you created a new account to post this comment?
Maybe you could post a little bit of background info about yourself and your lack of connections to Yell to avert any suspicion that you're not a genuine disinterested individual.
In any case - from my memory there were stories about this in the mainstream press. I can't vouch for their veracity but if you bother to reply then I'll try and find a few references.
Honestly I don't even know which way is up anymore with the yelp extortion fiasco, so much misinformation and yelps defense sounds credible vs some random angry small business owners. My cynicism says they're executing the ultimate public relations and smear campaign against anyone who dares speak up, panda888 being some low level drone in a messaging agency they hired whose radar picked up this thread /tinfoilhat
