Time reports that a restaurant in San Francisco, dissatisfied with the way Yelp does business, has offered discounts on pizzas to patrons who gave the restaurant one-star reviews on Yelp.
You can check out the range of reviews for Botto Bistro on Yelp by clicking here. Where you can see that the restaurant has accomplished its mission of earning a one star review.
And you can find Yelp users complaining that their one star reviews were deleted.
This is all interesting because according to Time “[one of the restaurant’s owners] said that he got tired of constantly being asked by Yelp to advertise on the site… and that they [the restaurant owners] simply do not care about online reviews.”
They must have been quite tired indeed… because as of today the following quote is on the restaurant’s Yelp site:
“This business is a Yelp advertiser.”
3 Questions That Arise From This Story
1. How can you tell which one-star review to trust when Yelp deletes one-star reviews, which you know are *wink wink* from reviewers who like a restaurant? Answer: the restaurant kinda has it right – reviews online of anything on any site can be manipulated. Don’t believe us? Just click “like” below this article and we will give you another free article to read in the very near future.
2. Why isn’t Yelp happy that people are reading and writing fake reviews that are getting national media attention? We thought they’d be excited as the page for the restaurant shows ads for other restaurants, which presumably pay Yelp.
3. When did this business become a Yelp advertiser? We first heard this story a few weeks ago. So they don’t care about reviews and are tired of Yelp, huh? We give them five stars on coming up with a great publicity stunt, and one star on the quality of service proving they don’t care about online reviews.
Categories: Mildly Bad News
NotTheWorstNews 
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