Why does a simple review site drive people so crazy?

The business owners she talked to essentially had the same stories. They would note that one day their Yelp rankings were high, and some other day, after a phone call from Yelp's sales team, their rankings were low. They also would have trouble getting rid of spammy reviews—something Yelp has since addressed by letting business owners respond to reviews for free. While upsetting for them and definitely worthy of complaint, that's not enough to win a claim for damages.

Additionally, spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose freely admitted that Yelp has an automated moderation system that sometimes removes legitimate reviews from businesses' pages. And business owners get upset even when their rankings improve thanks to that system. Removed reviews may have been written by users whose reputations have declined, or the moderation system may have identified the reviewer as a shill or a disgruntled employee. Several users e-mailed me to express confusion over the fact that their reviews weren't removed from their own pages or views of the Web site but were removed from everyone else's view of the exact same page. Ichinose e-mailed, "This system proves frustrating for some because it sometimes affects perfectly legitimate reviews. The flip side is that it helps protect against fake reviews from malicious competitors and disgruntled former employees. We think we've struck a balance that works well for business owners and consumers alike."

I asked Ichinose whether Yelp has considered creating an "archive" page of sorts, which a user could click on to see every rejected review for any given business. She replied: "If we show businesses what we regard as legitimate/valued (versus not), it helps them figure out our system that much faster. There isn't an easy solution, but we continue to explore ways to stay ahead of this." Yelp should indeed find a way to alert users when their reviews are marked for removal, as its current system does create confusion and mistrust.

For readers who think it sounds as if Yelp is overpolicing its review process, consider the e-mail I received from the owner of a Web site that offers to deploy, for a fee, the reviewing talents of more than 500 apparently compromised Yelp "proxy accounts" for any business owners who feel their Yelp scores are "inaccurate."

Yelp deletes perfectly accurate reviews.

True. Robert Dall, who runs the Coffee Vancouver blog, was solicited by a Yelp employee to add reviews from his blog to Yelp's new Vancouver listings. After doing so, and noting his blog url in each review, Yelp deleted his reviews and locked out his account, accusing him of spamming. After Robert wrote up his story and contacted Yelp, it realized it had made an error and offered to reinstate him. Understandably, he declined.