Yelp is getting a mass of bad press today. The site, which launched on 2004 and works essentially like Qype does; compiling users' reviews into a massive bank of helpful and handy local information has been lawsuited upon over advertising. Advertising, quite specifically, that comes in the form of suppressed and deleted bad reviews.

For a site that relies upon local knowledge and honest reviews, the case is damaging. Essentially, Yelp is charged with offering a $300 a month contract to Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital, a Long beach Veterinary Hospital, in order to keep bad reviews out of sight.

Apparently, the site's reviews are manipulated through "an extortion scheme" in which bad reviews are consistently moved to the bottom of a page listing, or in this alleged case, removed. They claims also list that Yelp promised that negative reviews wouldn't appear in Google or other search engines.

“Yelp thus capitalizes on the presumed integrity of the Yelp.com ratings system to extort business owners to purchase advertising,” says the complaint. “As a result, business listings on Yelp.com, contrary to the website’s ‘Real people. Real reviews.’ mantra, are in fact biased in favor of businesses that buy Yelp advertising.”

To me, this falls into the same categories of paid-for blog posts, which led to serious changes by the FTC in the way bloggers disclose brand collusion, benefits, and other reasons why they may be posting about a product, brand, or person. The concept behind sites like Qype and Yelp is great, and like blogging can provide clean and non-infiltrated views about local communities and places. Obviously since the sites work around trust, they don't work if there's an advertising bias. Even if Yelp does win the suit - and it'll be interesting to see if they do - a lot of the trust may have been lost.