When talking about reputation management, there’s two different types of reputation management that they offer. Personal reputation management is one type, that focuses on improving the search results for personal names.  The second type is reputation management for businesses, which most often is businesses who want to see glowing reviews while the negative ones are hidden away. And reputation management for businesses can get quite sketchy.

One of the main problems of reputation management is that some of the less trustworthy companies that do it are simply spamming in order to get the job done. Whether it’s getting a ton of fake positive reviews for business or attended negative ones for competitors, there’s a huge difference between companies that are doing reputation management the right way and those that are doing it the wrong way.

Yelp, one of the frequent targets by scammy reputation management companies, is going on the offensive and has filed a lawsuit against one of the company that is racking up victims of businesses that want to see great Yelp reviews. Many of these victims don’t realize it is against Yelp’s policies to do this because of the way these reputation management companies sugar coat how great they are, and then complain to Yelp when their money doesn’t improve their Yelp rating.

The company name targeted goes by the name of Revleap, but has also hopscotch through a variety of other names including Yelpdirector and Revpley.

How Revleap works is they essentially bribe the individual businesses customers or clients with gift card prizes for leaving favorable reviews. And this can be a little bit harder for Yelp to identify since it doesn’t have that traditional footprints of fake reviews. But offering incentives for good reviews is certainly against the else policies, and is also got the attention of federal and state regulators.

You can view the full lawsuit here.

This should be eye-opening to any reputation management company. While there are some companies that are completely above board, it’s the ones that are doing things like posting fake reviews or offering incentives for good reviews that should take note and ensure their practices won’t result in them being on the receiving end of lawsuit filed by Yelp.