Heh, you should hear their shady business tactics. It would be a shame if your business suddenly had 1 star on yelp.
I'm totally open to being convinced, but I'm skeptical right now that they are in fact that shady. I'm more inclined to believe that it's a placebo effect from suspicious people suddenly paying more attention to ratings after a sales call, and also attributing any negative dip in rating to the phone call they recently had. There are also third-party groups who call claiming to be able to list your business higher or rate it better, and I'm suspicious that some people confound these callers as yelp representatives.
And linked from elsewhere in the thread: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-yelp-ratings-20140905-... -- it just seems like with no scientific study backing the claims and case after case being lost, I think the onus of proof is on the people accusing yelp of these threats.
These stories are always about "friends" or "relatives", but nobody ever provides the link to the evidence, despite that being the easiest thing in the world to provide.
One wonders how profitable it'd be for Yelp to call small, local businesses at scale for shakedown, considering what's on the line reputationally if one or two people know how to record calls.
Gather a paper trails. For starters, screenshots of the page + emails and communication with the company.
You ask what would proving it accomplish? It would allow everyone to actually know what’s going on instead of stringing together a bunch of conjecture and anecdotes. It would enable change.
I totally believe that there are some shady salespeople at Yelp that talk about... the implications. But I doubt they actually do sell improved ratings.
We do know. Just most people refuse to believe until it happens to them, so Yelp continues to get away with it.
It seems like it would be an easy experiment for somebody to do. Find a local restaurant with some poor ratings. If they want to cooperate, pay a Yelp salesperson to "fix" the problem and see if it goes away. If they deliver, then you have a bombshell article that could go viral.
The reality is that its likely explainable through a combination of disgruntled business owners and overzealous/evil salespeople who make threats they can't follow through on, just to get sales.
(Though, some of the admin panels there have (or had, when I was there) a easy to use "Make user Yelp Elite" button, but I'm sure you'd get caught :)
I haven't evaluated it so it is possible that the study has serious flaws in its methodology.
Basically, they couldn't find evidence, but they can't disprove the hypothesis and they can only tell from the year 2012. Thus, they can't see if stores let their advertising expire before that year or see the reviews stores had before advertising if they started before that.