A few weeks ago I decided to put up a yelp account for our bakery/pizzeria. People that frequent us posted reviews and they all were removed. Today I got a call from a guy calling himself the Yelp rep for our region. I asked him why the reviews got pulled and he said because they are not regular yelp posters and all came from the same area. I said they are regulars from within 50 miles and posted positive reviews and I thought that was what it was all about. He kept going round and round with the software that protects us from false bad reviews from people that don’t eat at your place and I kept saying these people eat here, many daily. I finally asked him to yank us off Yelp. He said they can’t do that and why would I want that? I said I don’t want to be affiliated with anything that operates in such a way. I am figuring he was trying to smooth me over so he give some sort of sales pitch. I told him not to contact me again and hung up. I was born way before this internet stuff, have no cell phone, don’t text, and have no interest in it. It just seems to end up in a high blood attack. They can put on my tombstone - He never texted 
Walter
You have to play nice with them. If you tell them off you’ll find that only negative reviews will show up.
thanks for that info. Currently I run a bakery/pizzeria as a high school special education teacher in OH that teaches entry level job skills. We are planning a move west and opening our own pizzeria and continue my work with training/hiring people with disabilities. I tested the yelp waters here because we have nothing to lose. 90% of our work is with contracts for schools and a university. Our community customers are steady and we don’t need any more customers. When we open our own pizzeria I will not set up a yelp account for it. Thanks. Walter
Didn’t yelp get into some legal trouble a few years back by hiding good reviews of people that refused to pay for advertising with them?
I thought also GotRocks, but this was all i could find in 5 mintues… which rather depressed me.
We all know that yelp totally manipulates its reviews. Be very careful how you deal with them on your new location. We just started up about 5 months ago and did do advertising with yelp solely for the purpose of visibility. People use it and we wanted to be seen. I dislike yelp but it is what it is. I currently have stopped advertising with them as we now have made it to the first page when a search is done for pizza in our area. I’m just waiting to see how this will affect our rating and reviews. Also I believe that someone else can create an account for you on yelp and there is nothing you can do about this.
Legal extortion.
Very interesting info. I will avoid yelp from here forward. Thanks! Walter
You can’t avoid yelp. When you create a business address, yelp creates a listing for your business on yelp. The only thing you can do is: Don’t claim it. If you don’t claim it, people in your area who do a search for pizzeria’s on their iphone, will not see your business. (Iphone’s use yelp for their search, Android phones use google plus).
evidently that’s not true: We have NO internet presence, in fact we ignore it’s existence totally. And I just did a search from my iPhone, and we were the second listing.
Did you use an app or did you press and hold the home button and search by voice?
I used the “safari” search thingy.
That explains it. Safari is a web browser like internet explorer, not a “search thingy”. I meant Siri.
Yelp calls from a SF number at least twice a week during the day. We just stopped answering.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore a call from google! I’ve read a few stories where someone did, and their web appearance took a major nose dive
We get a automated call from “google” about every week, just hang up on it and ignore it. Can’t tell if it really is them or a scam, so i just don’t bother.
We get SEO (search engine optimization) companies saying they are google, or working for google trying to sell their services all the time. But one time the caller-ID actually said “GOOGLE”
I have been in the bakery/pizzeria world for most of my life but haven’t worked in the private sector since the internet. My current gig is a great one in many ways. I get teacher salary/benefits/retirement without any concerns for this stuff. I sure am getting an education here-thanks. Walter
GotRocks: We have gotten that once in awhile also, but being in Boulder, CO they have a campus actually inside the city. It’s fun taking those calls because they called the wrong store 
Back in june we took over a store that had 168 reviews on yelp!!- crazy granted the store was only open for 6 years. It seemed that if anyone had a slight problem with their order just went on yelp and left a bad review…and i most of the time go above and beyond to make sure the customer happy with it s a credit or money back or absolutely new order made and deliveried emmediatley.and it seems that some people dont want any of the above and the only thing makes them happy is going on yelp and leave a one star…thats sad. But i did hear more than one story when yelp will try to contact places and if they dont subscribe they would put some bad reviews just out of spite…