Yext launched a duplicate business listings suppression service today they are calling Powerlistings Über. That’s fancy talk for saying you can now kill duplicate business listings on publishers in the Yext Powerlistings Network with extreme prejudice. For those of you who have tried to squash duplicate citations and found it to be an endless and expensive game of whack a mole, you may want to check out Yext.

Here’s how it works:

  • Yext automatically identifies duplicate listings on a particular local search site in Yext’s dashboard. In the case below, the “Suppress Duplicates” option would appear next to a listing that has been flagged as having dupes.

Publisher Level Suppression

  • Clicking “Suppress Duplicate” brings up a screen that shows the listings for a specific NAP on the publisher site. Select the listings you want to torch and click “Suppress this Listing”
    Unlimited Suppression
  • The request then gets reviewed by both Yext and the publisher to make sure the user hasn’t made a serious mistake (e.g. deleting all their listings). Once it passes the review, it’s toast.
    Supression Status

Some key points about the service:

  1. You must be a Yext Powerlistings subscriber to get access to the duplicate suppression service
  2. Yext is pricing Powerlistings Über at a 25% mark-up to the retail rate of Powerlistings (a similar mark-up applies to resellers).
  3. The price is for an annual subscription and covers unlimited dupe suppressions. So even if the dupe reappears, you don’t have to pay to kill it again.
  4. When a dupe gets suppressed the publishers have the option to 301 redirect the dupe to the canonical listing on their site and potentially can merge reviews and other data from the dupe. Not all publishers will do this, but for those who do, this could have some SEO benefits.
  5. You can un-suppress a suppressed listing at any time
  6. If you cancel your Yext subscription, you unlock the dupe suppression and it is likely that over time the dupes will reappear

Last month Yext published a white paper I wrote on how to deal with duplicates where I suggested that given the problems with how local search services and the big data aggregators work together, the best solution for solving duplicate business listings is to lock the dupe at the publisher level. This is how Yext’s service works and in my view is the only way you can reliably squash dupes and keep them squashed. And the fact that Yext can do this automatically for potentially hundreds of thousands of listings at once means that it is an incredible solution for large and small multi-location businesses. If you consider how much it costs to manually clean up duplicate listings, this service starts to look pretty cost-effective. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Full disclosure, I do some consulting work for Yext and have been on their asses for a year to build this 🙂 Oh and check out their Whack a Dupe game too.

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12 Response Comments

  • Myles Anderson  June 24, 2014 at 1:40 am

    This is a nice development from Yext and will be good to hear from SEOs/SMBs using Yext if it works as it’s supposed to.

    Question i have – if the listings are suppressed at the publisher level why do they reappear once if a business doesn’t renew with Yext? It seems crazy that publishers would re-activate dupe listings that confuse users & reduce quality of their data set. Does this definitely happen and do Yext enforce this behavior with publishers?

  • Joy Hawkins  June 24, 2014 at 6:54 am

    I echo what Myles asks above. The thing that turns me off from Yext is the notion that you have to stay with them forever or all the work they do gets undone the moment you cancel. It reminds me of companies that charge you a monthly fee for a website and then take down the entire site if you cancel.

  • Andrew Shotland  June 24, 2014 at 8:09 am

    Myles/Joy,

    I think this is a case of shooting the messenger, or some other analogy where the person who is not the cause of the problem gets crapped on.

    The reason Yext’s system works the way it does is because the only way they can control what happens on a publisher’s site is to control what happens on the publisher’s site. That’s how Powerlistings work and that’s how Powerlistings Uber works. Yext takes control of the listings and can do what they want. Once they cede control of the listing (which happens when you end a PL subscription), your listing is now at the whim of whatever screwed up system the publisher uses. So it might stay the way it is or it might get overwritten. One of the reason Yext exists is because historically publishers and data aggregators have not been able to get their acts together.

    Of course Yext has an incentive to lock you in, but they are providing a service like any other. If you want to keep their service, you keep paying them. If you don’t want it, you stop paying them and you’re on your own.

  • Andrew Shotland  June 24, 2014 at 8:13 am

    Myles,

    Just realized I didn’t address part of your statement/question directly:

    “It seems crazy that publishers would re-activate dupe listings that confuse users & reduce quality of their data set.”

    Agreed. But that’s reality. Surely by now you have dealt with enough of these guys that you know data quality is not job #1 for them.

    “Does this definitely happen and do Yext enforce this behavior with publishers?”

    It doesn’t definitely happen. Yext doesn’t enforce this behavior, but they have no control over it.

  • Gabriel  June 24, 2014 at 8:14 am

    Just when you think Yext is about to do the right thing, they show their true colors. Keep paying them and everything is great, cancel and your money goes down the drain. Keep up the great work, Yext!

  • Russ Offord  June 24, 2014 at 12:32 pm

    So, I am a Certified Yext Partner, but I have found that the duplicate suppression options don’t just magically appear nor is there an option (yet) to activate them via the dashboard.

    In a recent blog post on the Yext Partners website they say:
    “Accounts with a duplicate suppression license simply hover over the business in the Listings tab. There should be a link there called, ‘Suppress Duplicates’.”

    This most likely means that you need request/pay for the license (per client?) if you have an existing client in your dashboard, before these options will appear.

  • Andrew Shotland  June 24, 2014 at 1:02 pm

    Hey Russ,

    Not sure but I don’t think the service has been automatically rolled out to all Yext customers yet. You may need to talk to your Yext rep to get it turned on.

  • Ed T  July 3, 2014 at 12:18 am

    I am a Certified Yext Reseller that signed up because sites like Yahoo and MapQuest were locking us out of the listings that I had claimed. Yahoo is very slow to remove duplicates or outdated content (MapQuest support was able to remove an incorrect listing by the following day). Yext ended up actually generating a duplicate listing in Yahoo, I know this because the listing that I had originally claimed and managed was out ranking the Yext PowerListing. Yext is supposed to have the ability to help identify and update existing listings when you first add a business location, but in this case it did not. I communicated with Yext’s tech support and what I hoped would happen was that Yext would remove their duplicate listing and update the incorrect listing because this listing was ranking well. I chose to opt out of the Yahoo listing in Yext but that did not remove their duplicate listing. Then Yahoo gave back the ability to login to my old account. I changed the address in Yahoo but it still did not update the listing. Then Yext came out with this suppression tool. I contacted them excited to finally have a solution but did not realize that this would be at an added cost. Yext created the problem and now wants to charge to fix it and Yahoo is in no hurry to fix the listing and they partner with Yext. The Yext tech support will even tell you that it will be difficult to have Yahoo fix the problem. Yext turned out to be a “bait in switch”. I have been in contact with Yext and am very unsatisfied. I would have preferred they grandfather in the existing resellers.

  • John Crenshaw  July 18, 2014 at 6:09 am

    Am I missing something? Granted we’ve only ever had one client that used Yext, but the one thing I really liked about them was the fact that their support was fantastic when it came to removing duplicate listings on any site in their network.

    We’d email them when we found a dupe and it would be gone within a day or two.

    Is this that different that it warrants a price increase?

    • Andrew Shotland  July 18, 2014 at 6:57 am

      John,

      I believe that previously the dupe removal process was informal so they did it kind of ad hoc as a nice thing to do for those clients who requested it. As requests increased they decide to turn it into a real product/service.

  • Aarthi Devanathan  July 18, 2014 at 12:13 pm

    Hello, everyone! I’m Aarthi, and I manage the Yext Certified Partner Community. I wanted to thank Andrew for his analysis of the new Duplicate Suppression features at Yext, as well as respond to a couple items here.

    First, @Ed T, thank you for your feedback! In the future, if you have any issues with your account you should contact partners@yext.com, where you can get a much faster response. We dug deep into your situation, and it seems to be a specialized case. We will be reaching out shortly to talk with you about this. In the interim, we have already reached out to Yahoo on your behalf, and we should be able to resolve this situation for you — and will do so at no additional cost.

    @John: You are correct in that we used to help partners with duplicates on a case-by-case basis. However, this was never part of the product. In addition, the extant infrastructure would not have been capable of supporting the increasing demand to solve this problem. Duplicates are an ever-increasing issue in the ecosystem, so we decided to make the investment with our tools and our publishing partners in order to empower our Certified Partners directly. Getting the solution right takes a lot more work (as everyone here can appreciate) and it comes with an additional expense. That said, we have gone to great lengths to ensure this ongoing benefit to our partners and their clients will vastly outweigh any price increase. And, as always, each partner can choose what level of service best fits their (or their clients’) needs.

    We are happy to discuss directly any more detailed questions you may have! You can email me directly at partners@yext.com.

    –Aarthi Devanathan

  • Russ Offord  July 21, 2014 at 11:49 am

    It would be nice if adding dupe suppression to an existing Yext account was a little easier. It seems there is a bit of a disconnect between support and implementing this new feature upon request.