The simple answer is that there is no easy way to remove your business from Yelp*. This has been asked from me thousands of times in the past 10 years and the response has not changed.
Yelp has not provided any solution to the business owners to request the removal of their business pages. The only cases we have seen are the ones imposed by the court, either to clean up the reviews (such as removal of many reviews submitted to defame a business by competitors, etc) or when the business has sensitive nature or doing illegal activities.
If your business has been a target of one or a group of users that submitted so many false reviews that there is no way to get positive reviews to fix the rating and you can prove that the reviews are fake and removal of those reviews would help, then consider filing an action for defamation in small claims courts. You may need to consult a defamation lawyer before moving forward with this.
Are You Considering Reporting Your Yelp Business Page Closed to Hide Negative Reviews When Removal of the Business Yelp Page is Impossible?
If your business is permanently closed, that is a good thing to report to Yelp that the business is closed or moved to another location. But if you think that reporting your business page as closed on Yelp only because you have several negative reviews would solve the issue you are facing you are wrong.
For a few years now, Yelp has offered a feature allowing you to report a business as closed. Anyone can report that a business has closed, and when a certain amount of people (the number of people is determined by Yelp) report a certain business as closed, Yelp moderators will begin to investigate the matter. Yelp moderators may use different techniques to verify the report whether to call the office number on the Yelp page, investigate the website URLs that have in their database (if you remove the website or phone number of the page still have it in their database), also they may search for clues on Google. If the website is down and the phone lines are not working and they don’t find any clue on search engines, Yelp moderators will simply put a notice on the top of the Business Yelp page that it is closed.
If you are planning to use this trick to get relief of those bad reviews I should say this will not benefit the business because of a few reasons:
- The Page Remains on The Yelp Directory
The page will not disappear. It will remain on Yelp, along with all previous reviews, comments, and pictures. The only change is that at the top of the page you will see a “Business is Closed” sign in red.
- Expect No Changes on Search Engine Results
Meaning it will not affect search results whatsoever. If you were finding your business Yelp Page URL on the search results it will almost keep the same ranking.
- Reversal Action
If at any time a Yelp user reports that the information is wrong and the business is in fact open (just under website, name or phone number), Yelp moderators will once again become involved. After their assessment, they may reopen the page and keep notes in their system of the fake reports. These notes make it highly possible that they will not take any closed reports for the business seriously in the future.
* This site is not part of the Yelp website or Yelp Inc. Additionally, this site is NOT endorsed by Yelp in any way. Yelp is a trademark of Yelp, Inc.
