Yelp: Can Businesses Buy Favorable Profiles?

Oakland's East Bay Express reports in its latest issue that local business owners suspect that Yelp might not be on the up and up. According to the Express story, Oakland businesses are getting calls from the popular user-generated review site that include an offer to clean up pesky negative review problems - for a price.

An East Bay restaurant owner was quoted as saying that a Yelp sales representative offered to move negative reviews away from the top of his businesses' Yelp page. For $299 a month. The restaurateur was one of six business owners who told the paper that they had received similar calls from the San Francisco-based Yelp. They were told that that negative reviews would be moved or removed if the businesses came on board with advertising money. "In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise," writer Kathleen Richards reports.

Yelp Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker adamantly denies in the story that such action can take place, echoing the for the people by the people approach outlined in the site's Frequently Asked Questions section. A former contract employee anonymously told the paper, however, that he's been told by sales staff that they can. Yelp's official blog also includes a response, in which Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman denies the allegations and gives readers a quick look at what a course at J School looks like (including a link to the American Journalism Review).

It is important to note that these allegations are entirely separate from the sponsored review feature that allows a sponsor to highlight a review that appears on the top of the sponsor's Yelp page.

Yelp started in San Francisco, but it's crossed the country and is a regular website-turned-verb here in Boston. Considering how many Bostonians use and contribute to the site, it's going to be interesting to see how this pans out.