Yahoo and Yelp - Promoting Your Business?

It is no secret that promoting your business through maintaining a strong online reputation and having a lot of positive content on the web is the best way to provide valuable information for prospective customers. Having solid star-ratings on the major review websites is one important piece of this process and the top search engines and review websites jockey to be the leading provider of quality information for consumers.

WSJ Article Photo: "Floor refinisher Dan Tringale
says nearly 50 reviews of his business have
disappeared since Yahoo made its Yelp deal.
'It's a slap in the face.' M. Scott Brauer"

While Google remains king of the search engines and thereby has the biggest impact with the reviews and star-ratings it lists, Yelp is growing and expanding its reach in the online reputation realm by making new deals with the other search engines, Yahoo and Bing. However, Yelp's methods are making many businesses "yelp" in frustration.

As this Wall Street Journal article notes, many businesses were aware that Yelp was joining forces with Yahoo so that Yelp reviews would be seen on Yahoo Local, but many were not aware that this would mean all of their previously posted Yahoo Local reviews would disappear!

For businesses that had few or negative reviews on Yahoo, this may have been a benefit, but some business owners had hundreds of reviews on Yahoo representing years of their reputation and often displaying the kind of quality customer service we all seek to provide, all gone and replaced with only the filtered reviews Yelp displays.

Yelp has come under fire for its filtering system in the past as many businesses feel that their positive reviews were filtered out while the negative reviews seem to have been given a more prominent place on their Yelp page. Others have reported that they were aggressively pursued by Yelp's advertising branch and felt that whether they chose to advertise with Yelp would make a difference in whether positive reviews would continue to be filtered - a claim that Yelp firmly denies.

Whether Yelp's move benefited or negatively impacted your business, it emphasizes the need to have reviews on a wide variety of review websites so your customers will be able to find a well-rounded base of consumer reviews from which to draw as they make their purchasing decisions. With Easter just around the corner, perhaps we should think of it as not having all of our review eggs in one basket.

Ann Pearson is the CEO of Impressions Review Managing, LLC - a company committed to empowering businesses to manage their online reputations. For more information about the services IRM offers, visit www.impressionsrm.com or email Ann at impressionsrm@gmail.com.