Restaurant Owner Says Yelp Hid Good Reviews After He Refused To Pay

The Toasted Coffee + Kitchen in Dallas has a three and a half star rating on the review site Yelp, a whole point lower than it has on Facebook. Reviews from visitors call it “Trendy but not in a pretentious way” and say it “Puts most Seattle cafes to shame.” But the owner, Bob Sinnott, thinks Yelp might be hiding other positive reviews because he won’t pay for advertising with the company, he told WFAA in December.

Sinnott said Yelp repeatedly reached out to him via phone, and would call him, sometimes as many as four times a day, to ask him to pay a fee on a monthly basis for help managing his restaurant’s page on Yelp. After he repeatedly said he did not want the services, the good reviews for his business started disappearing from his Yelp page, he told WFAA.

He believes that the reviews disappeared, and his rating dropped because he was refusing to pay Yelp, WFAA reported. Other business owners have accused Yelp of the same thing over the years, and the issue went to the Federal Trade Commission. There’s even a documentary about the topic called “Billion Dollar Bully,” currently in post-production, according to IMDB. But Yelp said in a blog post that the more than 2,000 complaints in the FTC case were “From businesses that simply weren’t happy with their ratings or reviews on Yelp.”

If Yelp is doing this, it’s not illegal nor does it qualify as extortion. A court ruled that businesses that have pages on Yelp aren’t entitled to positive reviews and said that the tactics Yelp was using were “hard bargaining,” according to the Associated Press.

Yelp told International Business Times that there were 14 reviews, all for Toasted Coffee + Kitchen, filed from the same IP address that belongs to the “business owner’s Yelp account.” When Yelp identifies reviews coming from the same address, they are taken as an indicator of “fake, biased, solicited or arm-twisted reviews,” and these are not recommended on the site, a spokesperson told IBT. Reviews that aren’t recommended are shown on a separate page and are not used to calculate the business’ average.

“Any claims that Yelp manipulates reviews for money or that advertisers are treated any differently than non-advertisers are completely false and have been repeatedly dismissed by courts of law, thoroughly researched and disproven by academic study, and investigated by government regulators, including the FTC, who closed a nearly two-year investigation without taking action,” a Yelp spokesperson told IBT.