How rating works
The rules every listing and rating follows.
Yardroll is useful only if clients can trust the scores and landscapers can trust the process. These rules apply the same way to every business on the roll.
Who runs Yardroll
Disclosure: Yardroll is run by WeldonPC, whose owner is related to the owner of a Northeast Ohio landscaping business. Ratings come only from signed-in client accounts whose writers confirm a paid job, and WeldonPC does not rate or rank businesses for pay.
That business gets no special treatment. If it lists itself, its listing and ratings follow the same rules as every other business on the roll, and so does every dispute, whichever business it is about. Nobody pays to be listed, to rank, or to remove or reorder a rating.
Who can rate
- Only signed-in client accounts. A client account is free and needs no email address. Business accounts cannot rate at all, so a business cannot rate itself or a competitor from one.
- Only after a real, paid job. The writer confirms that they or their household hired and paid the business for the work, in the month they choose, within the last three years, that it is their own experience, and that nobody paid or rewarded them for it.
- Once per landscaper. One client account rates a landscaper once. To change a rating, withdraw it and write a new one.
What a rating holds
Four scores from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent):
- On time, as agreed: did they start and finish when they said, and do the work agreed?
- Communication: did they answer, explain and keep you informed?
- Quality of work: how good was the finished work?
- Price matched the quote: did the final bill match the quote, or were changes agreed first?
Then: would you hire them again (yes or no), the service, the month the work was done, a title, and 40 to 2,000 characters about what happened. Listing pages show the average of each score over published ratings, the share who would hire again, and every published rating in full. The writer's username is never shown: a rating says only "a signed-in client".
What the automatic screen does
- It refuses email addresses, phone numbers and numbers shaped like a Social Security number, in listings, ratings and answers. The writer removes them and sends again.
- It flags for a closer look accusations of crimes, street addresses, names of individual people, profanity, threats, and links in ratings and answers (a listing may name its own website, so links in listings are not flagged). A flag never publishes or rejects anything by itself.
A person reads everything first
New listings, changes to listings, ratings and businesses' answers all wait until a person has read them. A rating is published when it describes the writer's own experience of a paid job and keeps to these rules; it is not published when it accuses someone of a crime without a court record, names or describes individual workers, shares personal information, is about something other than the work, is abusive or threatening, or reads as written by someone who was not a client. Yardroll checks ratings against these rules; it does not verify each claim.
What businesses can do
- Answer any rating, free. The listed business writes an answer from its business account; it appears under the rating after a person reads it.
- Dispute a rating or a listing. The dispute form reaches the desk, for example when a rating is not from a client or when someone listed a business without its say-so. What is published stays up until the request is decided.
- Leave the roll. A business can take its listing down at any time; its ratings leave the site with it.
- No fresh start by re-listing. A business that leaves the roll and lists itself again, from the same account or a new one, starts a new listing; the desk sees the earlier listing and how many ratings it had, and does not publish a new listing made to drop earlier ratings.
What nobody can buy
Nobody pays to be listed, to rank higher, or to remove, hide or reorder a rating. The roll is in name order unless a visitor chooses "most published ratings" or "newest". Yardroll Plus is for people choosing a landscaper (shortlist and compare); it changes nothing anyone else sees.
Writers stay in control
Every rating comes with a one-time withdraw code, and the writer can also withdraw it from the account page. Anyone can report a published rating with the link under it.