Yelp yelp.com Yelp is a ripoff to small business owners Internet, Internet

Yelp is supposed to be a website where consumers can check out small businesses and read customer review. Yelp prides itself on having filtered reviews. This means they remove customer reviews that their computer algorithm says is suspect. The people at Yelp do not make the decision, the computer program does. The problem with this is: the filtering program is terrible. They remove the positive legitimate customer reviews and leave the false negative reviews left by your competition. 

Yelp does not make money on customer reviews they make it by selling advertising space to small businesses. The business that get listed the highest have paid to be there. The Yelp sales team will claim that people search for your business on yelp because they are looking to do business. They claim all sorts of customers will come if you paid for the advertising. The truth is you will get increased traffic...but not from customers but from people trying to market to your business. That's right, if you advertise on Yelp you will pay hundreds of dollars per month to get your business known to telemarketers.

Yelp has a terrible reputation on Yelp! Just go to yelp.com and search for Yelp (in San Francisco) and you will see how bad they are rated and review by customers. Yelp is a huge hypocrite and it exists by taking the small businesses' advertising dollars and delivers nothing in return.