How To Delete a Bad Yelp Review

So you’ve gotten a bad Yelp review, what do you do?

Scream? Choke an employee? (don’t choke your employee’s) Hire your lawyer to sue your customer?

If your looking for an expert, you should call us. Like right now. 800-495-9413

While this is probably common knowledge for most, I should tell you that only Yelp Administrators can remove a Yelp Review, the only thing we can do is dispute bad reviews in an effort to get them to remove it. We can not remove reviews ourselves, on any website.

Screaming into a pillow is probably healthy, but you shouldn’t do anything drastic quite yet. Don’t even think about removal yet.

Don’t consider removal, yet.

Before you consider trying to remove the review, considering trying to win back this customer. Discover the terms required to broker their satisfaction, and DO NOT ASK THEM TO CHANGE THEIR REVIEW.

Ideally.. they will update their bad review from 1-star to 4 or 5-star, this article explains it wonderfully.

Here’s a checklist you want to ask yourself before you try to remove the review, if any of the following applies you might want to consider removal:

• Customer Isn’t Responding to Private Emails or Calls
• Customer has burned the bridge “did something beyond repair of a working relationship”
• Customer has already found a replacement product/service and has moved on.

Studies have been done to show that in small businesses, bad reviews can make or break you. Just having one bad review probably won’t ruin your business but depending on the content it certain has the power to drastically lower sales.

People Trust Yelp. 

Yelp is one of the most trusted review sites, period. It is definetely a go-to for Yelp Users, and for people doing research online, your Yelp Profile normally ranks in the top 3 results for keywords related to your business on every major search engine. Customers trust what they read on the site and therefore makes it crucial to appear your very best.

Steps for Removal

Surprising enough a decent percentage of reviews qualify for removal, good or bad. They qualify for removal because in some way or another they violate the terms of service, content guidelines or other loop hole that allows us to effectively communicate with their administration to remove the review.

Here are three steps to remove bad reviews on Yelp.

Step #1: Report the review to Yelp.

Yelp has guidelines and regulations that must be followed by users. When Yelp Administrators are asked to look at reviews that possible qualify for removal and feel the reviewer didn’t follow their policies, the review can and will be removed. Yelp removes reviews that are:

• Plagiarized. This will definitely not be tolerated because it looks terrible for the whole site. It is taken very, and any and all copied reviews/materials will be removed.
• Slandering Nature or A Threatening Tone. It’s okay to have a bad review about a business and let others know but when someone is lying just to defame a business, that is wrong and is grounds for removal. Threatening a business, employees, or anyone involved with the business is also grounds for removal. Threats should never be taken lightly and no matter how bad of an experience, it is never okay to threaten anyone. 
• Fake Reviews. Some people leave reviews that are clearly false in nature. There are no specifics on the products or services and the reviews are no help to any future consumers/customers. 
• Promotional Material Of Another Business.

In order to begin removing a bad review on Yelp, go to the review and hit the “flag” or “report review” button. Next, choose which reason applies to your situation and make sure to add detailed information about the review. The more details you add, the better your chances are of having the review removed. Once submitted, it takes about 3-5 days for their administrators/moderators to respond back. They will let you know then whether the review will be removed or if it will stay up.

What to do if Yelp says, “No”

You take the review to the next level of removal administrators that most people, marketers and “reputation experts” don’t even know about. It’s called the questionable content submission.https://www.yelp.com/support/contact/flagged_content

Your going to need the case number, a better strategy than your initial flagging and a calendar because it takes them longer to respond to this one.

What a review removal letter looks like

People hire lawyers to represent them in court. Why? Because they can get a better outcome. 

We have years of experience in disputing unfair reviews, and while Yelp Administrators treat everyone fairly, we have been paying attention to what get results.

We offer a do it for you solution to dispute bad yelp reviews, while we can’t guarantee removal we can set expectations pretty well with our scoring. For reviews that don’t qualify for removal, we help respond in a genuine way that speaks to the people researching your company, wondering if you care about customer service or not.

As you probably know, not all reviews can be removed. If someone truly had a bad experience, this is a legit reason for a bad review. Every company will not have a perfect 5-star rating and constructive criticism is definitely a positive thing, especially if you plan on correcting the situation for future customers/consumers. This makes you grow as a company and as a business owner. From the words of Mike Montoya, “Stop Marketing and be Remarkable.”