3 Reasons Why the LinkNow Yelp Reviews Are Higher Than They Look

 

At LinkNow Media, we take a lot of pride in our work.

Whether we’re helping our clients create the perfect website, or improving our marketing services, it’s all about doing good work, all the time. That’s how we managed to build a 10 000-strong (and counting!) client base. And for the 3rd year in a row, we’ve been ranked among the fastest-growing companies in Canada!

Which is why the LinkNow Yelp reviews are a sore spot for us.

We don’t deserve a 2-star rating on Yelp. After all, we have a 4.4-star rating on Google, a 4.5-star rating on Glassdoor, and a 3.8-star rating on Facebook. So, why is the LinkNow Media Yelp rating so low?

To try to get an answer, Wesley Mendelovitch, the President of LinkNow Media, decided to email Yelp:

 

 

They responded to Wesley’s email with the following:

 

 

In other words, the rating you see is not the whole story. It is a “feature” of Yelp’s review filter.

Yelp uses an algorithm to decide whether a review is trustworthy. Although we don’t know exactly how it works, we can guess that it takes account of things like:

  • • how many reviews the user has left on Yelp
  • • how active that user is on Yelp
  • • when the user signed up for Yelp
  • • the quality of the reviews they’ve left on Yelp

Based on these things, it either ‘recommends’ that review and includes it in the rating you see on our profile or filters it out and hides it. You can still see the filtered reviews if you click the link at the bottom of our profile.

To clarify the situation a bit, here are 3 things we know about the LinkNow Yelp reviews:

 

  1. The overwhelming majority of our reviews are 5-star.The problem is that Yelp only counts one of those reviews in its total. As they stated in their response to us, they use a filtering algorithm to weed out the untrustworthy reviews from the trusted ones. That’s fine. Fake reviews are a real problem online. But we currently have 105 5-star reviews. Why are most of our 5-star reviews filtered out?

 

  1. Almost 80% of our non-recommended reviews are 4 and 5-stars! We’ve worked hard creating killer websites with digital marketing strategies that are proven to help small business owners beat out the competition. Our reviews are overwhelmingly positive! Why does Yelp insist on hiding them?

 

  1. Most of our negative reviews were left by people who are not clients. Give them a read and see for yourself. We understand their frustration, but those reviews have nothing to do with our websites or our marketing programs. If you calculate our rating based on reviews of our services, you’ll see that our actual Yelp rating is 4.1-stars.
  2. Here’s a breakdown of the reviews made by people who have worked with us:

 

 
At the end of the day, we’re not satisfied with a 4.1-star rating but we definitely don’t deserve 2 stars. In the meantime, we’re working hard every day to improve our products and services!

Have you experienced problems with the Yelp reviews for your business? Let us know in the comments!

Aubrey Grant

Author: Aubrey Grant

About Aubrey Grant

Aubrey is a copy writer and Head of Content at LinkNow Media. An expert content marketer, he is obsessed with developing strategic solutions that emphasize elegance and simplicity. Although generally mild mannered, he has been known to fly into rages at the sight of a semicolon.