Yelp is an influential site but also tends to continually stir up controversy and disillusionment among business owners.

Love it or hate it - Yelp has the potential to be a force for good but sometimes ends up being one of the worst things that has happened to small business in the last few years. Both reviewers and businesses complain about the filtering algorithm which often hides good reviews while showing every bad one. There have been to accusations of extortion by Yelp, if you pay they claim they will remove competitor’s listings that normally appear alongside your business.

According to Yelp:

“Every Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp’s recommendation software based on quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community.”

Yelp usually puts more weight on reviews left by people who have a lot of friends, and who have left many reviews for businesses. Could it be possible that some customers find if they want to promote businesses they like, they must leave bad reviews for other businesses to make their good reviews look legit. Is it possible that these people will leave much

A few weeks ago I received a disturbing screen shot from an upset client.

A client was notified by one of their customers that while searching the internet to find the business’s phone number the customer saw an ad that had my clients name but did not go to their website.

Upon investigation we discovered the website was hvac.zone and they were running PPC ads using the business name of my client. The PPC ad directs people to a website and asks them to enter information to receive a free HVAC quote.

Turns out hvac.zone is run by Local Clarity Internet Marketing out of Irbid Jordan. So I went to the website and entered my information to see what would happen.

I received calls from Sears and one other local AC company which is a competitor of my client. When I explained to them what I did to initiate this contact and why, they both informed me that they received my information as a lead through Home Advisor.

About 15 minutes later Home Advisor called me to make sure I found an AC company and I explained the whole situation to a pleasant lady who acted like she was very