Serious, unsubstantiated allegations. If I could pay Yelp to remove reviews, believe me, I would. It would be far easier than the alternative: bending over backwards to make every customer happy.
Yelp's sales people can be aggressive, and it wouldn't surprise me if a rogue employee deceived a prospect to close a sale, but there is no way to pay to win. Yelp also does flag legitimate positive reviews sometimes, but the alternative is to be like Amazon where half the reviews are fake.
I believe that the middle ground is true: there's no official way for "pay to win", neither is the corruption so rampant that everyone has access to it, but there still is some.
You can allege anything. Whether the allegations are true is another question. You only have to read the various lawsuits that have passed on this issue to see how flimsy these business owners' cases are.
It would be so easy to demonstrate that you could pay Yelp to remove reviews, if the capability exists. Someone would have done so by now.
Pay-to-win does not have to be black-and-white; nor should one expect it to be if it could be used against them in a court.
All of the following can be true:
-Yelp removes obviously false reviews.
-Yelp does not remove obviously true reviews.
-It is better for your business' rating to pay Yelp.
Yelp is the arbiter of what constitutes 'false'. It stretches credulity to believe that Yelp taking payment from a business has no influence on this determination. Even sending paying and non-paying requests down different pipelines could result in more negative false reviews being removed for paying businesses. For instance, spending more time considering whether a review is false might lend itself to ultimately removing more reviews. This needn't be intentional.
So, the question in my mind is whether Yelp deserves the reputation; rather than whether any specific allegation is true in exactly the way it is alleged. If the allegations about their salespersons' claims are true the answer must be that they not only deserve the reputation, but that they built it themselves.
(As a Yelp user, I already consider them too shady to use. Maybe they've changed, but their deceitful links that pushed me to open their app were so frustrating and off-putting I've quit them entirely.)
I have never seen any credible evidence for this accusation. I don't dispute that some unscrupulous Yelp sales rep or another has represented this to be the case to some business owner who then posted about the interaction online. I do dispute whether Yelp actually does remove reviews for paying businesses.
