Businesses are becoming more and more aware of their presence on the internet – as they should be. Good internet presence is an amazing way to bring in more traffic to your business, so it should be taken advantage of.

Yelp is a very popular website and mobile app that has built their foundation on authenticity and quality reviews, most popularly for restaurants. In order to remain reputable (i.e. so that business are not able to give themselves fake reviews) the platform uses a unique algorithm to find and filter out reviews that are fake. The reviews that are flagged are displayed away from the other reviews and they also do not count towards the business’s overall rating.

The problem is that this system has no way to differentiate from an actual fake review and an authentic review with fake qualities. This means that many positive reviews for business are filtered out along with fake ones. Some business pages only display negative reviews, simply because all of their positive ones have been filtered.

So, how do you fix this? If you’re looking for a Yelp cheat code, there isn’t one (that we know of). It can definitely be inferred that Yelp is so successful because of how little control they give businesses.

Small business owners, do not despair! The fact that your Yelp reputation reflects your actual reputation should not be a bad thing. Many businesses are embracing this, and doing extra things in an effort to boost good reviews. Encourage that your guests download the Yelp app, write reviews, post photos of their meals, and rate the restaurant. The more reviews you get, the better your chances are of improving your rating.