Do Not Ask Your Customers For Reviews On Yelp
Online positive reviews are beneficial to your business. Positive reviews provide a strong impression of your brand as well as increase your business’s visibility for local search results.
For those businesses who use a reputation management platform, it is not recommended to solicit reviews on Yelp. Yelp has a policy to ensure all reviews are not influenced by businesses. Asking your customers for reviews on Yelp is a violation of their policy. Never ask your staff to compete to collect reviews. Also, never offer discounts or payments in exchange for reviews.
The nature of a violation is also going to come into play. Yelp is upfront about the severity of a violation and the penalty. Yelp will remove reviews that are in violation of their policy. In addition,Yelp uses IP addresses as one way to determine the legitimacy of a review. When a user’s IP address is not a match to the geographic location of a company being reviewed, Yelp will flag the review and consider it spam. According to Yelp, “Every Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp’s recommendation software based on quality, reliability,and user activity on Yelp. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community.” Yelp uses an algorithm for determining the reviews that will be displayed on the business’s page on the site. Therefore, do not ask your customers for reviews on Yelp.
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