BING - Claiming existing listings causes a DUPE?

[EveMendelovitch]

My staff is telling me that if they go to claim a existing BING listing that has a different address is automatically creates a dupe? And that once they claim the listing they need to chat with an agent to have the duplicate removed. What are they doing wrong - or is this the actual process?

 

[mikepetersonwi]

I was getting dups as well. What I was doing wrong was I downloaded/edited/uploaded the spreadsheet of all clients. The records of those uploaded are separate from those claimed manually. I chatted with Bing Support and they were really helpful with removing all dups. On a separate note, I was told the dups were only in the Admin interface and not in the public-facing side of things. As I said, they are removing them anyway just to clean up my view.

I think (this should be confirmed) the best way to manage this going forward is to download the csv of all locations, add your new locations, then upload the csv. This will sync the existing ones and add new ones.

 

[Chris Barnard]

Basically - as I understand it - Bing creates a new listing when the addresses don't match. So the process as it was told to me was to mark existing as closed, then verify new one. I questioned methodology many times and have many more chat transcripts. I'm confused just thinking about it.

The (partial) answer(?) from Bing support when I ran into similar situation DEC 2019:

[12/27/2019 18:49:17 GMT][Greyle]: It is part of a Bing process to mark an old listing location as closed and create new listing for the new location. Currently, your old listing is fed from multiple data feeds and updating this could cause the new address info to be incorrectly overwritten once the data pipeline refreshes.

As Bing is both a marketing platform and a decision engine for providing accurate search results, we preserve the historical accuracy of our customer’s search queries by confirming whether a business formerly traded from a location.

[12/27/2019 18:52:57 GMT][Greyle]: What I recommend is to revert back the old address of the listing in your account, mark it again as close and will verify it once again as an old listing. Then I can create new listing for you and verify it in your account to expedite the process.

 

[Peter Hill]

I recently discovered this too and it's taken a ton of work to undo. Basically, after I got bulk verified I imported my locations from GMB assuming they would merge them with the crappy infogroup data they had from 15 years ago.

Unfortunately, this was not the case and i recently discovered what users were actually seeing were the infogroup listings about 3/4 of the time. I've been in the process of claiming the old listings but since they have outdated web addresses I can't verify them online, and it's a huge pain.

This is a great thing to know for those of us who update Bing. It's unfortunate for them too because for months I just assumed we didn't get any traffic from Bing tracking URLs and more or less wrote them off.