Yelp Business Listings for Hundreds of Locations

[jonfoulds]

We?ve got a client with hundreds of listings who does not want to use Yelp Advertising, meaning no bulk upload feature is available We?ve got a few interns doing manual claiming of the listings, which is going to take some time.


However, we?ve run into an issue where we are blocked from claiming any more listings. After 9 listings were claimed, it blocked us from claiming any more and gave us a prompt to have a Yelp Advertising representative contact us. So, I called a rep yesterday and he informed me that 10+ listings for the same email address require the advertising platform. We obviously don't want to do this so we created a second email address to claim more listings and it maxed out at 6 this time. Our third email alias was created and Yelp would not let us claim any at all. It just said:


?You have exceeded the maximum number of attempts to claim your business page today. You may attempt to claim your business page after 24 hours.?


I?m guessing they?ve blocked us from claiming any more based on our IP.


Does anyone have a similar experience with this issue? My impression was that we could claim as many listings as we needed to without the bulk upload feature. Was the rep telling me the truth? Is Yelp even worth it at this point??


Am curious to hear what you guys think, thanks!

 

[Ashwin]

Jon,

Yelp does block the number of claims you can make based on the IP address. We've run into this issue multiple times and the only way you can fix this is by using proxies from different c-classes.

I would suggest you purchase proxies from a service like MyPrivateProxy.com which is pretty cheap and reliable. The shared proxies should do the trick and get you going.

Out of curiosity, it must take a long time to claim each listing manually, individually. How long does it take for you guys per listing?

A

 

[Eric Rohrback]

What about using an outsource service to claim all of them? Doesn't Whitespark or Brightlocal have a one-off citation package? I know Whitespark charges something like $4 per citation. I'm sending a tweet to Darren to see if he can provide a more definitive answer whether his service could do this a little easier for you.

 

[jonfoulds]

Thanks all. A few people here have used proxies before and that may be one way we have to do it.

Ashwin, to answer your question, it doesn't take too long for us, maybe a few minutes per listing. The company is aware of what we are trying to do and has people standing by for the Yelp verification call. However, the more time consuming part is creating the email addresses for Yelp and keeping track of listings. Since we don't have the bulk upload feature, there is plenty of manual work. We are using a spreadsheet for keeping track of all of our listings (which email address they correspond to, if they've been claimed, etc.)

Eric, thanks for the insight there. Not something I have personally looked into yet but I'll ask around here as well. I know we are using MozLocal already for other citations. It's just Yelp that is the current bottleneck.

 

[Ashwin]

What about using an outsource service to claim all of them? Doesn't Whitespark or Brightlocal have a one-off citation package? I know Whitespark charges something like $4 per citation. I'm sending a tweet to Darren to see if he can provide a more definitive answer whether his service could do this a little easier for you.

I don't think neither Whitespark nor BrightLocal handle directories that require verification by phone.

 

[naivecandide87]

I work for a competing company of Moz and we charge customers $50/location/year for manual claiming of up to 4 directories, Yelp included.

For multi-location businesses, manual claiming of Yelp is an absolute must and is requested 100% of the time... We've regularly claim thousands of locations on Yelp for larger clients, with a relatively small account management team, so I can't imagine we run into the same problem (unless we have a basement full of slaving interns I don't know about).

What I DO know, is that we don't use proxies and our IP address has never been blocked. I think Yelp is strategically targeting certain people to sell their VERY EXPENSIVE service (we had a client show us a $50K quote for something we did for under $12K).

 

[Dobo]

I agree with the above poster and believe the business may have been strategically targeted by Yelp ("to teach you a lesson" in harsher terms). From my experience, bad things tend to happen when you refuse those Yelp Advertising representatives.

However, it's also possible that Yelp just blocked you temporarily if you're doing too many of these verifications at once in such a short span of time. Maybe try waiting 24-48 hours before doing the verification under another e-mail address?

 

[Eric Rohrback]

@naivecandide87,

Can you explain your post a little more? Why would you think Yelp is specifically targeting a business? The more likely reason why businesses get locked out of creating more locations is because their IP address is being registered many times within a short amount of time. Google does the same thing. It's a common spam deterrent for many larger directories.

Are you using some sort of automation (read: bots) to claim citations? Doing multi-location claiming for any directory manually would be very tedious, so the usual play is either machine-automation or outsourcing to lower price point areas of the world (India, Malaysia, etc...)

Can you provide more information how you're able to bulk-claim yelp?

 

[chadkimball]

Can you provide more information how you're able to bulk-claim yelp?

very interested in this too

 

[Ashwin]

I recently wrote a bot to mass claim Yelp listings and didn't hit any block hurdles. So, I don't think Yelp really throttles you when trying to verify a few 100 per week.

We did about 400 last week without any problems.

 

[chadkimball]

I recently wrote a bot to mass claim Yelp listings and didn't hit any block hurdles. So, I don't think Yelp really throttles you when trying to verify a few 100 per week.

We did about 400 last week without any problems.

Ashwin, PM me I'd love a copy of this

 

[rosshouser]

I recently wrote a bot to mass claim Yelp listings and didn't hit any block hurdles. So, I don't think Yelp really throttles you when trying to verify a few 100 per week.

We did about 400 last week without any problems.

Ashwin, PM me I'd love a copy of this