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Yelp suit on reviews stirs the pot for local restaurateurs

 
Don Arvin, co-owner of St. Petersburg’s Casita Taqueria, says a bad review on Yelp! may be written by a disgruntled ex-employee and a good review by the chef’s mom. [DIRK SHADD | Times]
Don Arvin, co-owner of St. Petersburg’s Casita Taqueria, says a bad review on Yelp! may be written by a disgruntled ex-employee and a good review by the chef’s mom. [DIRK SHADD | Times]
Published Dec. 15, 2015

Don Arvin, co-owner of St. Petersburg's Casita Taqueria, routinely combs through his online reviews.

"As owners we all talk about it, and most of us take our reviews very seriously."

But these sites are not all created equally, he says. TripAdvisor draws reviewers who are more worldly and well-traveled; Google reviewers tend to be younger people who are highly web savvy. Rewards Network reviews and OpenTable reviews are reliably legitimate because they can only be written by people who have actually visited the restaurant (OpenTable reviews are only for restaurants that accept reservations). He thinks Urbanspoon has fallen off a bit, the Myspace of review sites. And then there's Yelp, the 900-pound gorilla of online restaurant reviews where, he says, a bad review may be written by a disgruntled ex-employee and a good review by the chef's mom.

Last week in San Francisco, Yelp filed a suit against the operators of Yelp Director, which also does business under the names Revpley and Revleap. Revleap operates a paid service that it says can "create a large constant flow of positive reviews that stay on top of your [Yelp] profile, and remove fake reviews."

Claiming "trademark infringement, unfair competition, cybersquatting, contract interference" and engaging in "fraudulent, unlawful, and unfair business acts or practices," Yelp insists Yelp Director undermines its integrity, which of course impacts business. And this is big business: By its own accounting, Yelp hosts more than 67 million user reviews and currently is accessed by approximately 139 million unique visitors every month, making it one of the most popular business review sites on the Internet.

Founded in 2004, Yelp reviews dog groomers and mechanics, but restaurants live and die by these online reviews, often referenced as a mobile app for where to eat right now.

"I think that the whole management of online reviews is difficult for restaurants," says Joe Orsino, chief executive officer of Caledon Concept Partners, parent of Ceviche and Rococo Steak. "We spend quite a bit of time on it. I've seen reviews where people give false or incorrect information and I've reached out to Yelp and TripAdvisor and lobbied to have those blatantly false reviews removed, mostly with success."

Yelp's claim of trademark infringement with Yelp Director may be valid, but in an environment rife with false reviews, is the rest of the suit specious?

Curtis Beebe, owner of Dade City's Pearl in the Grove and San Antonio's Local Public House, has an interesting perspective.

"When you read what Yelp Director says they do, they collect and encourage their customers to write positive reviews. It cheapens Yelp's illusion of reliability."

For Beebe, there's emphasis on "illusion."

"They've got this nebulous algorithm they use to decide which reviews they show and which they don't. Yelp sells restaurateurs ads that they say don't have any impact on which reviews show — but it feels like they do. If I buy a particular package from them, they will place an ad on all of my competitors' landing pages and they will keep my competitors from putting ads on my page. That's kind of blackmail to me."

Beebe questions whether Yelp Director's behavior is fraudulent. He suggests consumers need to be savvier about assessing the veracity of online reviews.

"You can look at online reviews and make some assumptions about who wrote them. Someone who has written just one review and it's five stars for a restaurant in their town" is likely to be a shill for the restaurant.

As per the lawsuit, what Revleap is doing is not far from what many restaurants do routinely — encourage satisfied customers to give them positive reviews.

The question, then, is how to appeal to the better angels of our nature, assuring that these sites don't verge on "advertorial" but also aren't, as Arvin says, "an open forum for people who want to complain and vent."

Orsino says that these sites' legitimacy often hinges on their vigilant policing of suspicious reviews, but a larger solution is greater transparency.

"I think that you'd see a lot more honest reviews if they weren't anonymous. That would cut down on false negative and false positive reviews."

Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley on Twitter.