&#62; "give businesses the ability to respond to reviews for free and "<p>Yelp has had the ability for businesses to respond publicly or privately to a review for almost a year now I believe.<p>&#62; "don't artificially alter results, be like Google and let your algorithm work."<p>The same game happens in the web search world - it's called SEO.  Yelp's spam algorithm is decoupled from any advertising, yet since business owners don't write their own reviews, they have less control over their reputation (as opposed to webmasters who change their page content), and are much more likely to come up with conspiracy theories as to why things happen the way they do and consequently often get very frustrated.