How to Remove a Negative Review From Yelp

As a multi-location marketer, managing your business’s online reputation is a must. Eighty-eight percent of consumers now trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 

When to Consider Removing a Negative Review

Before we get into removing a negative review from Yelp, let’s dive into what to consider before deleting a negative review. Negative reviews happen. They often show potential consumers that your business is real and provide an opportunity to win a customer back, but sometimes, there are reasons for a negative review to be removed.   

According to Yelp’s Content Guidelines, six types of reviews can be removed and include: 

1. Explicit or offensive reviews: These types of reviews often include hate speech, threats, or harassment, all of which are grounds for removal. 
2.  Reviews that include private information: Yelp also encourages users to avoid using confidential information. If a review contains too much personal information about the reviewer or someone else, it can also be removed. 
3. Irrelevant reviews: Yelp encourages users to leave reviews that are relevant to the forum. If the review isn’t relevant to the business or experience, it can be taken down. 
4. Plagiarized reviews: This one speaks for itself. Reviews that are plagiarized and contain content from other reviews, websites, or businesses will be removed by Yelp. 
5. Conflict of interest reviews:  Contributions to Yelp should be unbiased and objective. Competitors shouldn’t leave reviews about your business, just like your business shouldn’t ask friends to leave positive reviews. 
6. Reviews with promotional content: Unless connected with Yelp advertising, Yelp emphasizes that their reviews are not a place for promotional content. If users post a review promoting their product or business or other companies, Yelp can remove the review. 

Any of the previously mentioned review types can and often should be removed. Next, we’ll look at how your business can get any qualifying reviews removed by Yelp. 

How to Remove a Negative Review From Yelp

When it comes to removing a negative review, the process is relatively simple. To remove a negative review on Yelp, your multi-location business must flag the review it would like to remove. Yelp’s operation team will then analyze the request to determine whether or not the review violates Yelp’s Content Guidelines. Once your business has flagged the review, you can view the status of the flagging. By hovering over the flagged review, you can see whether the team is in the process of reviewing the flag or has decided to leave the review up. 

Once the status is complete, the operations team will contact your business through the Yelp platform or email to notify you of their final decision. If the operations team has decided to leave the review up, but you think the decision was a mistake, you can flag the review again, leading to the same process. It’s also important to note that Yelp has bots that scope out fake reviews, automatically removing them without your business having to flag them. While this isn’t always the case, it is something to consider. 

Now that you understand how to remove a negative review from Yelp, it’s time to start managing your online reputation. Learn how SOCi can help.