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I have a plumbing business that has listings on many of these directores. I think Google gets me the most traffic but I still get calls from several of them, like Yelp. My advice to all plumbers is the reviews do matter. I was slammed and missed a few calls from someone that had an emergency and they wrote a bad review on my business (so I wont name it) and I lost two jobs - so far, because that one review. I solved the problem that by my answering service which I found from www.profilesandreviews.com but I have no idea how to get that one bad review removed. It ready cost us about $500, at teh very least.

MikeCynar, on 17 February 2012 - 01:10 PM, said:

So you never did any plumbing for the person that gave you a bad review? And your only crime was not answering there phone call because you were possibly busy with another customer - sounds crazy to me. Do you live in a town where you are the only plumber? Sorry, I'm not understanding how you could have got a bad review, when you did not due anything for the person or take their money!

I wouldn't try to "get the one bad review removed." (Yelp won't remove it even if it is false.) There are ways to suppress it when folks do a search, but even that approach isn't your best bet.

You want to present your take on what happened (preferably without disparaging the reviewer) and describe how you have taken steps to resolve the problem. Folks who rely on social media reviews tend to understand that mix-ups happen. They are looking to see how you handled it. In addition, if the folks who wrote the bad review came back to the forum and complained about you trying to "remove" their review THAT would damage your standing even more than the initial review. Best to treat the whole thing as an exercise in building trust.

First thing to do on that front is to get satisfied customers to jump in with positive reviews. Whether the bad review is true or false, you want readers to see it as an aberration. Combine that with the "what I did to fix this" reply mentioned earlier and you will likely lose little business going forward.

MikeCynar, on 17 February 2012 - 01:10 PM, said:

Your review of Yelp overlooks what may be its most egregious practice: it filters out selected reviews as "untrustworthy," and will not say why; the filtering operates without any apparent rhyme or reason. Filtered reviews of a company are accessible via a hard-to-find link at the very end that is actually grayed out, and their ratings are excluded from Yelp's overall rating for that business. For example, consider Yelp's page for UPS (L.A). At this writing you'll see 27 reviews, and will almost certainly never see 18 more that have been filtered out -- most detailed and specific and all but one extremely negative, assigning the lowest possible rating. (This doesn't even count 2 more that you can't even read, because they supposedly violate Yelp's TOS.) Rely on Yelp at your peril.

I'm sorry to say that your reviews of Angie's List and Merchant Circle may shortchange consumers. On the upside, Angie claims to minimize ringer listings by cross-checking reviewers' phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc., and by restricting the number of contributions coming from one user. However, she pitches companies aggressively for paid "enhanced listings" that bias search results. And the smaller base of reviewers (who must pay for membership) compromises aggregate reliability. Merchant Circle, on the other hand, is worse than worthless to the consumer -- because the merchant may freely *delete* any review the merchant doesn't like.

I use Urban Spoon to find retaraunts when I travel. Never thought to use Yelp.

I use Trip Advisor too. Which do you think works the best on a smart phone?

This post has been edited by Aquariuzz: 21 February 2012 - 07:22 AM

These sites are a double edged sword. The sites allow regular people to have a voice but there is also zero accountability. One can post a negative review without even having used the service. OTOH I can leave a glowing or not so glowing review about a service or business that I used.

There's nothing to stop people from posting fake positive reviews or fake negative reviews.

OdinJ, on 20 February 2012 - 10:39 AM, said:

Hi OdinJ!

I hope you are having a nice day so far. I am a member of the MerchantCircle Community Team and wanted to clear up a couple things about our policy surrounding reviews and review removal. Very recently we have implemented two NEW REVIEW POLICIES to ensure consumers are getting the most accurate feedback on businesses listed within the MC site.

These new policies are: 1) Merchants may no longer delete reviews posted to their registered (or unregistered) listings and 2) Reviews may no longer be left anonymously (this helps prevent "fake" reviews from being posted).

Of course, we will remove reviews that violate our Content Guidelines but for most part, we find this doesn't apply.

You can learn a little more about these new policies through a couple articles published in our Help Center:

About Review Removal: http://merchantcircl...articles/323928
Reporting "False" Reviews: http://merchantcircl...articles/323928
Content Guidelines: http://merchantcircl...articles/379699

Thanks for posting this comment and I'm glad I had a chance to respond to your very valid concern.

Happy Wednesday

This post has been edited by MerchantCircle: 22 February 2012 - 01:13 PM

Quote

The reply of the Merchant Circle team member is perplexing. Sure enough, one of the articles she references claims that "Currently, there isn't an option to remove or edit reviews." That article appears to be on Merchant Circle's website but I couldn't find it using normal search procedures. On the other hand, a user turning to MC's "Support Center" will as of this writing see links to exactly 5 articles, the very first entitled "Remove a Business Listing." This article (read it here) starts out saying:

Quote

Interestingly, the same article goes on to explain how unregistered merchants may not remove a review but may remove the entire listing. Since registration is free, however, my guess is that such a merchant would choose to register and keep the listing, just removing the bad review(s).

This post has been edited by OdinJ: 22 February 2012 - 04:26 PM

Question. Where's foursquare? You should definitely have foursquare in this list

has ANYONE used it??? Im going to use it so comments please!

Dreamkitty Jul 1, 10, 10:18AM | #1
Has anyone tried this website to get a literature review done? I havent tried it yet and I want too, im on the verge of paying but I want to know if it is reliable and not a scam. I phoned their number as well and they didn't sound American? its also weird there is only one testiomonial. Any advice will be helpful, please recommend me a good site if that is a scam.

WritersBeware Jul 1, 10, 12:29PM | #2
= fraudulent site from Africa

Dreamkitty Jul 1, 10, 02:13PM | #3
WritersBeware- Thank you so much! for the reply, you saved my money. I am definetly not going on that site again or any others for that matter. Im just going to work hard and do the assignment myself. No wonder I thought the ladi'es voice was foreign, she was speaking in an accent and I thought she must be polish or something lol. And everytime I went on the 24 hour helpline it was the same lady helping me called "Kate". And when you phone them it doesn't seem like a busy department but like you are phoning to their house.

hunter424 Nov 23, 10, 12:34AM | #4
this site is ************ can't finish ur paper on time, and the paper they wrote is just like ********** even make sense, they can't even write paper in English. Most of their sentences don't make sense at all....I screwed up my project,I got 28% only!!!I just didn't check the paper, this really pissed me off...
fine, this is a lesson, I'll study hard, never trust there **** writing service. they are all fraudulent !!lstay away from them, they'll screw u up!!

forumregulator Nov 23, 10, 01:45PM | #5
hunter424:
I got 28% only!!!