Sep 24 2013
20% of Yelp Reviews are Fake!

20% of Yelp Reviews are Fake!

Of the millions of reviews on Yelp and other review sites, today we are reading headlines that many, in fact a good portion of these supposedly authentic reviews are FAKE. And that people all over the world are being paid to write these fake reviews. Anywhere from $1 to $10 per review. Yes, someone in India could be writing a review of a restaurant in Los Angeles, CA.

The number of fraudulent reviews on Yelp rose from 5% in 2006 to 20% in 2013, according to “Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud,” a report by Luca that was co-written by Georgios Zervas, an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University. Analyzing an additional 316,415 Yelp reviews of Boston restaurants, 16% were filtered and identified as fake, Luca says.

Read more here.

I use Yelp, but with caution, there are people trying to game the system both to hurt business and lift their own businesses.

And remember that Yelp has algorithms in place to “protect” business from fake reviews.

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