Is yelp.com Safe?

I think that this website technically qualifies as a scam. I often read and hear stories about how Yelp essentially extorts businesses for money to remove bad reviews, which were likely generated by the website itself or one of its associates. Moreover, they now have legal permission from the courts to change business ratings for money. These stories, and many others, all point to one conclusion--the only thing that we should be "yelping" about is this crooked website. Do not pay attention to it or its reviews--they should be considered an extension of paid advertisement obtained through questionable means.

Several business that I know well and generally receive great reviews, suddenly started seeing their rating go down, when Yelp removed all positive reviews they had, only to leave a single bad review in place. When contacting Customer Service of Yelp, they were told that this can be remedied - after becoming a paid subscriber to Yelp. I call that practice blackmail. Avoid.

Yelp is showing incorrect informations. The site filters all former reputations from qype and shoes only very few of them. Also company informations shown as headlines in google are incorrect and destroy small business as customers believe what they read on yelp........ We own a shop and yelp shoes us in the google search on the second place with headline that our shop is not open: " shop is closed" (in german Vorübergehend Geschlossen) These informations are incorrect. There is no way to change that from our site - we updated informations on the yelp site but still same fault appears.... so this is inacceptable. T..... - Vorübergehend GESCHLOSSEN - München ... ***** › Shopping › Outlets‎ Bewertung: 4 - ‎4 Erfahrungsberichte - ‎Preisspanne: €€ 4 Beiträge für T... Vorübergehend GESCHLOSSEN " Customer Service is not reacting on our requests to change that.

Corrupt and very doubtful. Good evaluations can be bought, if one does not pay, they'll get bad evaluations switched. Korrupt und sehr fragwürdig. Gute Bewertungen können gekauft werden, wenn nicht gezahlt wird, werden schlechte Bewertungen geschaltet.

Requires your e-mail and even into your e-mail to harvest addresses of your friends. This is a grave privacy risk to yourself as well as to your friends. It also requires your zip code and birthday. Too much personal info to be required to give a website just to make posts there. They must be paying WOT off with a LOT of money for that Green dot when the largest portion of reports from folks here are extremely negative!!!