"Recommended" Yelp Reviews

Ever wonder why all the reviews you get on Yelp don't count towards your overall rating? How is it possible that you can get a 5-star rating from a customer, but your overall Yelp rating doesn't reflect it?

Only some reviews are considered "recommended", which means they are more visible to users and contribute to your overall score on Yelp (represented by 1 to 5 stars). According to Yelp, 75% of reviews posted are recommended.

So when is a review recommended by Yelp? When it meets their [very vague] criteria. Here's a video from Yelp explaining how and why they do what they do:

It's clear that Yelp is trying to weed out the problem of paid reviews. Some marketing companies offer a service to post fake reviews for your business. They create fake accounts on sites such as Google and Yelp and post glowing reviews of your company. Yelp wants to make sure that their service only reflects honest and true reviews from real people who have actually interacted with your agency.

You can find the non-recommended reviews right above the "From the Business" section in light grey text. If you currently have recommended reviews, then you can find this link directly below those.

If you click the grey link, a section will expand that leads with the video I've posted above, and below the video will be your reviews that are not recommended.

Here are some more FAQs from Yelp about reviews.