Yelp's coming to town—big time!

The online city guide Yelp is moving into the Valley, saying it will be employing as many as 200 people, the PBJ reports:

The center will employ sales agents and account managers.

CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the Scottsdale office will be Yelp’s third to go along with its San Francisco base and an office in Manhattan.

The Phoenix Yelp site is here.

Yelp has its uses, and it also has its detractors: A story from last year from the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Berkeley, detailed some of the outfit’s dicey leveraging of its reviews and its advertising. It began this way:

The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”

The story had a half-dozen local businesspeople testifying to calls like that—and the unconfirmable but nagging sense that negative reviews of their places of business cropped up high on their Yelp page just before the sales folks started calling.

The Express story got criticized by Yelp, mostly for the fact that all of the people quoted in it didn’t want their names used.

The reporter, Kathleen Richards, defended the practice, noting that the businesspeople understandably didn’t want to get on Yelp’s bad side.

… but just to make the point, she turned around and wrote an even longer piece, this one with a slew of on-the-record complaints about the same practices or worse. That story’s here.