Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
It sounds to me like Yelp is upset that other businesses are trying to do the same thing they do. My friend was GM of a new local restaurant here, and at first they were getting lots of 4 and 5 star reviews and almost none below that. But around the time they were contacted by a Yelp sales rep to start paying for promotion and advertising, the 4 and 5 star review stopped coming. My friend watched multiple people post reviews that never appeared. Then negative reviews started appearing from people that he knew never came in because he was working the host station all day. All this activity was reversed once they started paying for Yelp services. It's the kind of behavior that's impossible to prove for anyone outside of Yelp, and they of course claim they don't do it.