The Review: Yelp's Review Filter Algorithm Revealed

Whenever someone leaves a review on your business page, Yelp’s algorithm kicks in within the first 48 hours of its posting. But what does Yelp look for in a trustworthy, hi-veracity review?

According to Yelp, “We use automated software developed by our engineers to recommend reviews from the Yelp community. The software looks at dozens of different signals, including various measures of quality, reliability, and activity on Yelp.”

What the are really saying with this is “Based on our state of the art proprietary technology your company’s veracity score is falling and we trust you less and less. The scoring engine says many of your positive reviews or reviewers are fake (or solicited by you, etc.) We don’t think that’s a coincidence. So, we’re going to filter all your reviews unless we REALLY trust them. Since we don’t trust positive reviews much in the first place, most of your favorable reviews will be filtered. Xoxo Your Friends at Yelp”

Ok, we get it, Yelp does not trust any reviews that come in unless they meet specific criteria that is determined by the veracity score of your business Yelp page. So, how do we make Yelp trust us?

Review length

One thing that most people are unaware of is that Yelp tracks the number of words in all of their reviews. Yelp has calculated that that the average review is 130 words and that positive reviews tend to be shorter than 130 words, while negative reviews tend to be longer.

When you think about this, it makes a lot of sense. Contrary to what Yelp says, the majority of people who leave reviews on Yelp are looking to vent their frustrations with a company, not rave about their great experience. People have no problem sitting down and explaining every little detail about their negative experience. This is because when someone has a bad experience with a company, they feel that they were wronged or cheated in some way. They think to themselves “I’m not supposed to be treated this way, I’m a paying customer” (even when they are not), which then evokes a very emotional response in the form of a negative diatribe about your company.

When someone has a good experience with your company, their expectations are simply met and nothing more. They feel that they paid for a service or product and that they received what was expected. They feel don’t need to waste time talking about the experience that met their expectation as that was supposed to happen. They only will spend time on the parts that exceeded their expectation.

Review Content

Yelp also scans a review for anything that may violate Yelp’s Content Guidelines as well as any bias they may have one way or another.

Yelp’s Content Guidelines are gospel to them. They do not care about facts, all they care about is whether or not a review violates their predetermined terms. One of Yelp’s biggest content guidelines is that a review cannot be written by a third party on behalf of someone else. They want all reviews to be accurate personal consumer experiences. When you write a review for someone else, you break that guideline.

If a review uses too many words that could be associated with a third party experience, it has a higher likelihood of being filtered. Words that represent a third party experience like: my friend, my wife, my husband, my mother. Words like that need to be avoided.

They are also looking for reviews that are too biased one way or another. Yelp knows that no experience is all good or all bad. If the review itself is coming off as too positive, it will filter it. I wish that I could say the same about negative, but that doesn’t tend to be the case. So make sure a positive review is not too positive, or you will lose it to the review filter.

Review Location

Yelp also looks at the location from where a review was written. We are not talking about where the reviewer is from so much as we are talking about where the review was actually written. Yelp has your business geo targeted. They have exact coordinates on the map that represents your business. If they find that too many reviews have been written at the same coordinates, they will filter any review written from those coordinates. They do this because they believe that you are asking people to leave reviews for your company while they are at your business location and that is a yelp no-no.

Along with coordinates on a map, Yelp also tracks the IP address of all the reviews that come in. So the same principle stands, if too many reviews are written for a business from the same IP address, those reviews will be filtered.

One final note on the review location is desktop v mobile. Yelp is a platform that prides itself on being engaged with the community. It is an app that is used for busy people who are out and about in their community. As such, Yelp gives more veracity to reviews that are written from a mobile device than they do a desktop device. They give more credibility to a review that was written by someone who was out and about and wrote the review as they were having the experience, as opposed to someone who was hunkered down inside writing about a stale experience they had last week.

Remember, it is not any one thing that Yelp looks for when filtering a review, it is a combination of factors.

If you have any questions about The Reviewer leave a comment below, or if you would like to enroll in our Yelp Rating Accelerator Program where we use our proven methods to help you improve your Yelp rating you can click here to book an appointment with us now.