Bad Yelp Review Leads to $750,000 Lawsuit

Guest post Provided by Review Mediation

Have you ever carelessly posted a Yelp review? Watch out, it could come back to bite you. For one unlucky reviewer, the bill for her scathing commentary might be $750,000 — you read that right. On Yelp, and other sites, Jane Perez typed out her dissatisfaction after Christopher Dietz did some construction work for her. Dietz in turn took her to court saying her comments amounted to defamation; the courts agreed with him and Perez had to take down specific segments of her written reviews.

Along with criticizing his work, Perez wrote that she suspected Dietz of stealing jewelry from her home. Unfortunately for her, Dietz was not one to take the importance of online reputation management lightly. Neither should you. Every day, more folks are gaining a deeper understanding of the impact their online reputation has on their lives. The First Amendment protects your right to express your opinions, but making false and malicious claims about another individual or entity may put you on the wrong side of the law.

Being measured with one’s words when speaking before the public is advised. It may hard, being used to oversharing, and all, but the consequences of not doing so may be even harder to face.
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Read More: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/12/09/166815629/bad-meal-to-yelp-or-not-to-yelp?sc=emaf

How To Work To Erase Bad Reviews Online

Article provided by Reputation Stars

Every business runs into unhappy customers, and in many instances it can only take one unhappy customer to create a very negative perception about what you offer in terms of products or services. A negative review that appears on an internet site can do a lot of trouble for you, spreading on social networks, linking in news stories, comments sections, and more. There are ways that you can help fight these negative reviews though and work to bury them so that they are not the first thing people read about when learning about your business online.

Online reputation management is extremely important for every business, and can go a long way to making those bad reviews virtually disappear. Unfortunately on a site such as Yelp, there is no delete button to get rid of a review you do not agree with. What you can do though is utilize the power of things such as link building and social networking to help grow a reputation with your online business online. There are several strategies out there, but the key to all of them is that the more proactive you are, the better off you are going to be in the short and the long run.

When you have put the work in, the results that you see for your business when you search for it on a search engine such as Google will be more than positive. The reality of it is that when you have a business, you want your reputation in the online communities out there to be as positive as possible. This will drive new customers to your business to try your products or services. This in turn is going to allow you to grow your sales and grow your business overall.
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This article was provided by Reputation Stars.  Reputation Stars provides online reputation management and reputation monitoring services. If you have negative reviews and feedback online, visit Reputation Stars website for more details on how they can help you.

Bing’s New Policy on Removing Defamatory Content

In a new article published in SearchEngineWatch.com,  Pierre Zarokian writes about the changes in Bing’s policy on removing sites from its search engine based on court orders. It appears that several attorneys have found out that Bing refuses to remove certain content from its search engine, even after a court of order declares the content defamatory. This could be bad news for companies that have defamatory content posted against them.  This technique was one of the only ways you can get defamatory posts removed from such sites as Ripoff Report.  Some of these court orders are actually honored by Ripoff Report itself, but usually if it is a default judgement it may not be accepted, which is when you want to submit your order to the search engines direct and hope that they would honor the removal.

The article includes contains details from the attorneys, Bing’s response to the recent claims, and interesting commentary by Eric Goldman, a prominent professor of law.

More details can be found at:
Details on Bing’s Policy to Remove Defamatory Content by Our CEO