Problems with Yellow Pages

[Sarah FBM]

I have noticed for several months now a recurring issue with Yellow Pages basic free listings not applying NAP changes. It seems that regardless of what change is being made, they do not apply the updates to the claimed listing but generate a new, unclaimed one instead. It will show up within about a week, and the description, categories, etc will be identical to what was updated, but the claimed listing never gets changed despite it showing up correctly in the dashboard.

I advise my clients if they have their own YP managed to contact them for help, and I've got several clients that are still going back and forth with them after 5 months. The YP support basically refuses to acknowledge the issue. I even had one extremely angry client who rebranded - just a name change - and YP sent him both links back and said "These show the same thing" when they clearly did not. Client was livid, and even though it was YP's issue, I'm the SEO lady so I get yelled at.

I'm getting extremely frustrated since people still hold YP in high regard, and I am helpless to do anything short of a barrage of fruitless e-mails and phone calls.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, have you found a work around for it? I don't have enough ibuprofen to handle this much longer.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

I just pay a service like whitespark, brightlocal, or Yext (there are dozens others out there btw) to handle the claiming part. Messing around with manually updating citations hits a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly. Like you said, the support is sub-par for YP so it's not worth the headache... maybe it's too late for you since you're taking ibuprofen lol

I went through that pain in the past, and after a few of those issues I started building the cost of those services into retainers. I don't know if you'll be able to have a work around since it is YP that is screwing up.

Maybe someone who does manual citations can chime in with a fix (hopefully)?

 

[Digitaldar]

You may need to move to a state or country that sells something stronger than Ibuprofen

Or educate clients that YP does not need to be held in high authority? LOL

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I have noticed for several months now a recurring issue with Yellow Pages basic free listings not applying NAP changes. It seems that regardless of what change is being made, they do not apply the updates to the claimed listing but generate a new, unclaimed one instead. It will show up within about a week, and the description, categories, etc will be identical to what was updated, but the claimed listing never gets changed despite it showing up correctly in the dashboard.

I advise my clients if they have their own YP managed to contact them for help, and I've got several clients that are still going back and forth with them after 5 months. The YP support basically refuses to acknowledge the issue. I even had one extremely angry client who rebranded - just a name change - and YP sent him both links back and said "These show the same thing" when they clearly did not. Client was livid, and even though it was YP's issue, I'm the SEO lady so I get yelled at.

I'm getting extremely frustrated since people still hold YP in high regard, and I am helpless to do anything short of a barrage of fruitless e-mails and phone calls.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, have you found a work around for it? I don't have enough ibuprofen to handle this much longer.

YP has been having this issue for awhile. Close to a year now I'm guessing.

It's worth noting that the customer service center you talk to does not talk directly with the engineering department. Even if they did, I doubt they would know how to explain the issue. They will just feed you what they've been told, which is "technical site issues that should be fixed soon". Like I said, it's been close to a year now.

The issue has been through a few iterations.

The 1st issue was the worst, where changing any information in the dashboard completely broke the listing. The listing in the dashboard no longer communicated with the online listing. It was a nightmare. When you escalated the issue, they couldn't get it fixed.

Around 3-4 months ago they fixed that to the current iteration you're aware of, which is it just creates a new listing. It does this randomly. Sometimes it updates correctly, sometimes it does not. You can tell if it will update correctly by checking the listing from the dashboard after you make the change. If the link still goes to your listing, you should be good. If it just takes you to search results on YP instead and no listing, it will create a new one for you.

It's also worth knowing that Dex bought YP and it's now DexYP. Since that, engineering for free listings has been absolutely terribly.

Anyways, the 1st iteration was a complete and total nightmare. Listings breaking left and right, no fixes, etc.

The 2nd iteration is a nuisance, I'll grant you that (creating new listings isn't straight forward anymore and breaks, claiming also breaks, among other things) but it is manageable. Again, not ideal, but can be fixed.

In your particular instance, call into support and ask them to "suppress" the 1st listing you no longer have access to. Also, any changes you need to make from here on out, I would ask them to make manually on their end. They'll probably tell you to use the dashboard but insist on their help. Make sure you spell out very clearly what you need done. If it's a name or address or anything phonetically inclined, make sure you do the old "m for mary", "d for david", "c for charlie" etc. and ask them to repeat it back. If you do that, it saves you another phone call for them to get it correct.

Whatever you need done will be done in 24 hours. When they suppress listings, change info, that information is typically updated in a few hours on the live site. If it's not fixed within 24 hours, you'll need to call back in.

At Local Listing Ninja we deal with YP on a consistent basis. They are a massive headache as you well know but it doesn't look like it's getting fixed any time soon.

Hope that helps!