Taking a negative Yelp reviewer to court for defamation is not easy and can be more harmful than good. Take the Reviewer to Court for Defamation However, customers voluntarily writing good reviews because they truly enjoyed their experience are welcome. That would be taking away the authenticity of the forum. Just as it is important to maintain the integrity of Yelp by refusing to delete bad reviews, Yelp’s Content Guidelines also state that you should not be asking customers to write good reviews. The reviewer may not respond to you but at the very least, you are publicly trying to address the issue and future readers of the review can perhaps take away that the business wants take the opportunity to improve and appreciates the customer’s opinion. You can also respond directly on the review on Yelp so that it is public, that you acknowledge their opinion and would like to make things better. There are ways through open communication that make it right again and perhaps the reviewer will feel better about your business and voluntarily remove their review. Perhaps it was a bad day for the business, a mistake, or the reviewer was just misunderstood.

If what the reviewer is saying is within their right to have the opinion, perhaps you can try contacting them through Yelp to see if you can address the review to make them happy. Yelp will usually remove these types of reviews.Ĭontact the Reviewer to Make Things Right Furthermore, if the customer has threatened to leave your business with a bad review unless they get a refund, or are otherwise leveraging the bad review as a form of extortion, then this too is unlawful. Violations that may be removed are if the review is clearly from someone who did not actually visit or use your business, or is using language that constitutes threats, harassment, racial slurs, or lewdness. The point of Yelp is to provide honest reviews from real customers to the public and Yelp wants to keep the reliability of their forum this way, so unfortunately, you cannot delete a Yelp review, no matter how damaging it is.Īlthough you can’t delete a bad review, Yelp will recognize if a review, on its face, appears to be a violation of their Content Guidelines, they provide the opportunity for you to report the issue so that their team can review it and perhaps remove it based on the violation. Unfortunately, Yelp does not allow business owners to remove any review just because it is unfavorable.

If your business is in this position, there’s a few things a business owner can and cannot do in this situation. The problem with Yelp is that unreasonable clients can often hold a business hostage by threatening to leave a terrible review unless they get their money back, even for a job well performed. One bad review can really hurt! Deleting the bad review to maintain your business’ reputation would be the first thing do, right? It’s probably not a big deal if you have thousands of reviews, but this can be pretty damaging when you are just starting out and have a minimal amount of reviews. So you got a bad yelp review for your business.

Delete yelp review