Why am I getting positive fake reviews on my yelp page?

[Kevin]

I understand that fake reviews are becoming a problem on yelp and other reviews sites. I understand why you would write a positive fake review on your page and then write negative fake reviews on a competitors. However, what is the motivation for posting fake reviews on a page that are positive?

We employ an SEO manager but I am very confident he does not post fake reviews on our behalf. I just wanted to rule that out as an option.
****I do not intend to write fake reviews on yelp. I merely have fake reviews populating on my page and am curious on why this is happening.****

[James]

"However, what is the motivation for posting fake reviews on a page that are positive?"

You mean posting fake good reviews on a competitor's site? My only assumption is that if all the sudden yours gets tons of positive and a competitor gets tons of negative it could look obvious.. I would never suggest doing fake reviews - but if you do make sure you're careful and don't make it super obvious.

Hope that helped!

[Nitu]

Because you want good reviews and competitor get bad review.

[Venugopal]

you cann't write the fake reviews on yelp page it will not take

[Doodled]

Well there is a dark rumour that Yelp does this and then contacts you to try and get you to pay for advertising. If you don't all the positive reviews suddenly disappear into the filtered section. Just a rumour mind.

Yelp also flags businesses it thinks are trying to game the system as part of a "name and shame" system. It is possible one of your competitors is doing this in order to trigger the flag. In this case your best option is to report the fake reviews to Yelp yourself now before they point the finger at you....

[psi]

Hi Kevin,

'Doodled' second hypothesis is absolutely spot on. I did work with a client, who was in exactly same situation as yours. Thinking that fake positive's can't harm his Yelp profile really, he let them go unchecked, and that's what got his Yelp profile banned. He was pulled down for trying to game the system.

We went searching for the root cause of this problem, client's competitor had put up a job on one of the freelancing sites, to get fake positive reviews posted on my clients Yelp page. Competitors intention was exactly as 'Doodled' surmised, to get my client's Yelp page pulled down. Once we found the job posting on the freelancing site, we requested that site to pull down the job, and then cleaned up our clients Yelp profile. after a while we got the thumbs up from Yelp and were back in game again.

Make sure you report this fake review problem to Yelp right away.