While I can't say whether the new claims are true, they certainly bring Yelp's reliability into question. The company, however, denies the allegations, contained in a filed Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Back in December, there was news that Yelp had been. I hoped that would help Yelp solve whatever problems it has and return credibility to its reviews. My sense is that Yelp does have a problem and I generally find the claims against the company to be reasonably credible. Of course, I could be totally wrong.

As businesspeople, we are increasingly finding ourselves held hostage by Yelp and other review sites, where a handful of disgruntled customers, or competitors pretending to be customers, can .

It may be that customers are sophisticated enough to take the good with the bad and average the reviews out. I don't think so, but owners and employees can definitely take a negative Yelp review more seriously than it probably deserves. Customers may do so, too.

Further, Yelp reviewers are self-selected and represent, I believe, atypical customers. I only post on Yelp about places--restaurants, usually--that I either really love or where I had a bad experience.