When I read the news of this, I had to do a double-take (and a spit take). Yelp is really introducing a “Racist Alert” for businesses.
This kind of flagging of businesses accused of racism by consumers can be problematic.
Here’s how the process works according to Search Engine Land: “Yelp said it will place a new category of consumer alerts on the profile pages of local businesses that are accused of discrimination or racist behavior.
“Warning shuts down new reviews. The new ‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’ alert serves as a warning to consumers and reads, ‘Recently someone associated with this business was accused of racist behavior…’ It also links to news reports documenting the alleged conduct or incident(s).
“When the alert goes up, Yelp disables any new reviews for that business profile. That prevents the page from being flooded with reviews from non-customers expressing political or ideological viewpoints or otherwise objecting to what the business is accused of doing.”
The problems lie in ambiguous cases along with misuse. As far as ambiguity it’s not always easy to come to a consensus of what racist behavior actually is.
In regard to misuse, negative SEO and fake negative reviews have been around for many years. This gives black hat SEO’s and others who want to hurt a competitor’s business another tool in the toolbox to do so.
Hopefully Yelp will address this in a robust and meaningful way. But that remains to be seen.
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