Removing Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories

[Local Search News Curator]

Duplicate listings can very easily turn into the plague of the online marketing of every local business. They not only often feature old or incorrect and misleading information, but could also potentially “transmit” this information to other sites, thus spreading it throughout the whole ecosystem and ultimately reaching Google’s local data cluster, which could be devastating for business’s local search rankings. Unfortunately, getting rid of such duplicates has proven to be more difficult than any other process related to local listings – adding, claiming, or editing them. Additionally, there is currently no automated service that deals with this problem, so manual clean-up is the only way to go.

EDIT:

Originally curated at Scoop.it but I think this is a great post and Nyag is a member here at the forum. So I moved it to the main discussion forum.

Also want to give you a DIRECT LINK to his post, so you don't need to click through Scoop.it to read the rest: Removing Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories

What do you guys think???
Please add comments and questions below.

 

[Sue]

Google have definitely let businesses down in this area. Constantly merging or creating duplicate listings and getting it wrong seems to happen a lot. It is also very hard to correct incorrectly merged or changed information on business listing as well as duplicates - I have been working on a Google Places listing for nearly 3 months now that Google decided to change the name of the business back to its old name even though the website clearly states the new name. No luck so far - I am now going down the road of deleting and starting again - very frustration and who knows if Google will merge or change the listing again in the future!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Sue,

Welcome and sorry you are having problems.

Duplicates, merges, name changes and moves can be extremely complicated issues and if you go the wrong direction you can tie things up in a bigger knot that makes it harder to fix.

Feel free to post details in our help section of the forum. I'd advise getting advice before making any more changes. We're here to help! But you need to start a new thread in that section.