East Bay Express | News | Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/yelp_and_the_business_of_extortion_2_0/Content?oid=927491&page=1

Nt sure if it is true bt if yes then Yelp better hv an explanation.. http://tinyurl.com/cmach3 [from http://twitter.com/rohitharsh/statuses/1227620373]

...interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise

Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. "Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, 'Sorry, it doesn't make sense for me to do this,' ... then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing." To these mom-and-pop business owners, Yelp's sales tactics are coercive, unethical, and, possibly, illegal.

♺ @themartorana Turns out, YELP is evil. Corroborated by a local Philly establishment. I feel lied to by YELP. http://bit.ly/YelpIsEvil [from http://twitter.com/inxilpro/statuses/1231965312]

Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site ... for a price.

Yelp - is it extortion?

I guess this was the first in the series of articles detailing Yelp's shiesty biddness practices...

part 1 of 2, this is the one that got picked up by the WSJ et al. The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy. "Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews