When you Cancel Yext PowerListings What Happens to Citations?

[Linda Buquet]

Hey guys, we've had some threads about Yext and what happens when you cancel their service.
They just did a post on their blog about what happens when you cancel OR don't renew.

How Yext Works: Canceling Yext

This part of our series on How Yext Works is about what happens to business listings and information either without Yext or after someone has elected to not renew their Yext subscription. Having not been at Yext very long, this was one of my biggest questions and, frankly, misconceptions upon my arrival. Looking at many blog posts and comments out there, I am clearly not alone. So let’s discuss the (unthinkable) scenario of what happens after Yext PowerListings are turned off, which also provides some insight into what happens to all business listing data without Yext.

As we covered in the first installment of this series, Yext PowerListings give control of business listings to business owners and professional marketers through a process called Match and Lock.

But what happens when the PowerListings subscription is not renewed?

Does the business listing data get deleted by Yext at each publisher? Does Yext take down the Name, Address, Phone (NAP) from each of the sites and search engines? Does the business’s online presence disappear? Lastly, does Yext put the old data back that used to be wrong?

The answer to all of these questions is a resounding and emphatic, NO!

Read the rest for all the details about how this works.

Here are a couple related threads here at the forum.

Canceling Yext PowerListings

Comparison Between Manual Citation Building and Yext by Nyagoslav

 

[russofford]

Hi All,

Nyagoslav has performed a case-study which proves that listings can and do get deleted after cancelling a Yext service: http://www.ngsmarketing.com/what-happens-when-canceling-yext/. Take a while to read through all the comments, too.

I think Yext's response to the matter is somewhat deceptive.

I looked at the data he provided in the spreadsheets and confirmed that 12 or 13 of the listings were deleted completely from the IYP venues and another 4 'reverted' to their old data.

What we don't know is how long the client was signed up for the Yext service and how many of the major aggregators and/or other major data sources had the old/outdated NAP data still. (Which could be a factor influencing how the IYP venues rate the authority of the Yext data after the Yext 'lock' is removed on the listings.)

Also worth reading is my comment on Mike Blumenthal's article on the subject:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/01/yext-local-seo/#comment-686218

Russ

 

[russofford]

To follow up on this topic... I spoke with a Yext rep and they told me that it is more likely for a listing to disappear upon cancellation if the listing did not already exist before signing up for Yext's service.

Age of Listing:

They also seemed to thing that the length of time that those newly created listings are live may also affect how the partners deal with the Yext 'lock' coming off of the listing upon cancellation.

In any case, they say that it is really up to the publisher as to what they do with listings after Yext is cancelled. The publisher may feel another source has a more authoritative listing. Hence the necessity to 'fix' the NAP inconsistencies at their sources.

Fix the Sources:

One 'source' (besides the infamous Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze trio) that I've been looking more closely at lately is the CrossWalk data provided within Factual.com listings.

If I find an incorrect or duplicate Factual listing I will open up the IYP listings they reference and work to correct those venues as well. I think this may become more important over time as Factual seems to be becoming more of a major player in the major aggregator league.

Russ