How Does the Yelp Filter Work?

This blog was submitted by: http://yelpmediation.com/.

Positive reviews on sites such as Yelp can help improve your local search engine rankings and bring in business. Yet this popular social networking review site has been known to filter reviews. Although filtered reviews don’t disappear, they do get featured on a separate page from the rest of the reviews and are not factored into a company’s overall star rating. For this reason many people want to know just how this filter works.

According to the company website, Yelp uses filtering software to scan loads of information associated with every review. The software is designed to flag illegitimate reviews, as well as reviews that don’t meet the company’s Content Guidelines. Reviews that violate Yelp’s guidelines include inappropriate content, promotional content, irrelevant reviews, and reviews that feature stolen intellectual property such as photos. Yelp’s filtering software is also sensitive to reviews that display a conflict of interest, such as reviews of your own business, or your relative’s business. The software also targets reviews that publicize private information, such as posting photographs of people without their permission.

While Yelp provides users with Content Guidelines, it not disclose exactly how the filter works, and admits that sometimes the filter can be wrong, filtering legitimate reviews as questionable or questionable reviews as legitimate. For this reason, the software is designed to regularly reevaluate its decisions based on new information, and often filtered reviews get placed back in the legitimate pile.