How Do I Recover ‘Not Recommended’ Yelp Reviews?
Many of our clients are facing problems with their yelp profiles with Yelp’s new step-ups in their ‘Recommended Review’ filter. Yelp has taken to filtering both good and bad reviews on business profiles in order to promote authentic and helpful reviews and weed out fake ones.
What does it mean if a review is ‘Not Recommended’?
If a review is ‘Not recommended’, it is not visible on your profile and does not factor into the overall review of your business. The reviews are not deleted, however. They are still accessible via a link at the bottom of the profile.
What gets filtered?
- Reviews are from users who have only written 1 or 2 reviews
- Reviews by people who have empty or unfinished profiles (profile photo, additional info, link to Facebook, etc.)
- Are strongly slanted both positively and negatively, leaving only 1 or 5 star reviews
- Short Reviews that lack details or explainations
- Reviews from a strange location, somewhere far from where the business is located
Yelp bases their filter on quality, reliability, and user activity. If a user leaves a review on your page and they are not an active yelp user or has an incomplete profile, Yelp doesn’t feel like they can trust the user, and does not recommend their reviews. This was put into place so that businesses cannot create multiple accounts just to post reviews on their own page. Users need consistency and quality to be perceived as credible by Yelp.
How do I recover my reviews?
You can appeal to Yelp to try and recover the ‘not recommended’ reviews. But in all likelihood, the best you will be able to do is recover one or two. They are not permanently filtered. The filter decides which reviews are most helpful, and this is always changing. If a Yelp user is new and they are getting filtered, the more they post, the more their reviews will be ‘recommended’ and start showing up on the main pages of business, even retroactively.
To avoid getting reviews filtered from your business page we recommend engaging with the reviewers and interacting as much as possible:
- Add the reviewer as a ‘friend’ on Yelp
- Send a message to the reviewer
- Write a response to the review
- Up vote the review as “Useful” or “Funny”
A video Yelp released to explain how their filter works
And remember…
Never make fake reviews on yelp and never ever pay people to leave your business reviews on yelp. You will get penalized, and potentially reprimanded resulting in a lawsuit. You can always recommend your customers to leave you a review, but do not pay them or bribe them or offer a discount to those who do. Just keep practicing good business and do not try and cheat the system.