Customers are increasingly taking to online review sites to post positives and criticisms about companies and services they use, including real estate services. A growing number of online reputation management companies is surfacing, promising to help business owners “bury” negative customer reviews about them online on popular review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List. 

For example, these online reputation management companies, such as RemoveMyName.com and Profile Defenders, say they can help remove the chances that these negative reviews will appear at the top of search result pages.For example, Profile Defenders offers “100 percent guarantees to get rid of unwanted Yelp results,” charging $5,000 to do so. 

"There are certain loopholes on Yelp that we've been able to manipulate legally," Richart Ruddie, the company’s chief executive, told The Wall Street Journal. 

But a manager at Yelp warns small businesses to beware of some companies that claim they can remove bad reviews from business review sites. Yelp reported in March a surge in the number of users who say they were contacted by reputation-management companies about having negative reviews removed about them and an offer to help boost their ratings for a certain fee. Many of these online reputation companies work by trying to bury the negative reviews by boosting the search rankings with more positive information about you, such as by creating positive Web micro-sites about you or posting a series of positive stories about you. 

But review sites, like Angie’s List, say business owners need to know that negative reviews won’t just disappear from their sites. On Angie’s List, company officials say that any request to remove a review will spark an investigation, which includes contacting the person who posted the review. 

Yelp says that business owners are better off contacting their support team if they have a question regarding the validity of a review posted about them. Yelp’s support team can remove questionable negative reviews. 

Source: “Hoping to Fix Bad Reviews? Not So Fast,” The Wall Street Journal (July 26, 2012)

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