“Asking for reviews at all, even if the business breaks norms and attempts to ask more than just their happy customers, can create a bias away from organically motivated reviews. Over the last few years, Yelp has made their stance on solicited reviews much more clear and stepped up their enforcement against solicited reviews.

Yelp claims that the key to the quality of their reviews and lack of bias is their ability to filter out reviews that appeared to have been solicited in one way or another. However, in recent years, Yelp went from frowning on solicited reviews to completely outlawing them.īut what does it mean exactly for reviews to be solicited? Yelp’s early trustworthiness came from its strict policies. It was argued that a Yelp rating was based on the most objective, unbiased reviewers around. Getting a high star-rating on Yelp was (and still is) something to be proud of. One of the things that set Yelp apart in its earliest days was how legitimate the reviews on their platform were. They like to control where and who they come from.

If your business is on Yelp, you’re probably already very familiar with how strict they are about the way their reviews are created. They have good reason, but does that mean all solicited reviews are bad? We weigh the pros and cons here and provide our best suggestions to get more reviews for your business. Yelp doesn’t want you soliciting reviews for your business.

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