Why Yahoo Local needed to change its review policy

User ratings and reviews can be one of the most useful aspects of sites focused on local businesses and services. CitySearch, InsiderPages, Yelp, Yahoo Local and others have built legions of loyal users who enjoy sharing their experiences and reading the opinions of others.
The future of those sites depends on users’ trust – in the sites and in each other.
Savvy businesses know that ratings and reviews can impact both the perception of their companies and the positions of their listings. So it was only a matter of time before unscrupulous elements started exploiting ratings and reviews to improve their visibilities and harm the credibility and reputations of competitors.
Thankfully, Yahoo Local’s recent update closed a loophole and changed the way it allows users to rate and review companies. For local businesses like florists, it’s a definite step in the right direction.
Prior to the change, Yahoo users with logins were allowed to leave anonymous ratings (without reviews) or to leave written reviews anonymously. On one level, the practice gave users the ability to rate freely – but local businesses, especially those with anonymous, reviewless dings to their reputations, had no way of knowing why they were earning negative marks (unless they accidentally spotted them while viewing a user’s profile…which was highly unlikely.)
Yahoo’s new review policy should go a long way in preventing the kinds of ratings and reviews seen in this screen shot (taken before Yahoo Local’s recent update.)

For the record, all the 5-star ratings are for listings owned by the same company (some employing mapspam techniques by using fake addresses) and all the 1-stars (which appear without attribution in those business’ listings) are for their local competitors.
This negative rep abuse of florists was reported to Yahoo Local and it appears at least some of the anonymous slams were reversed (though the large group of phony local florist listings still stands – we’ll have more about that soon).
Yahoo Local now requires comments (with only a 50 character minimum) and requires the reviewer to identify his or herself by email address or nickname. While there are still ways to game the ratings system, Yahoo’s change goes a long way in stopping review abuse.