How To Prevent Yext PowerListings From Creating Duplicate Pages on Your Site

I often get the question “Does Yext create dupes?” so I thought I would post this to clear up the issue. The basic answer is “No, Yext does not create dupes but sometimes third parties using Yext create dupes.” Let me explain:

1. When setting up a Yext PowerListing, you can create a new business listing which may duplicate an already existing listing. While you can never be 100% certain what dupes are lurking out there, before you create a new listing, Yext offers a list of potential dupes and you should also do your own research (try NAP Hunter – It’s Free!) so you don’t accidentally create a new duplicate listing. That said, Yext also offers a powerful Duplicate Suppression Tool which you can use to squash dupes that works  great.
2. When a Publisher in the PowerListings network (e.g. Yahoo Local) posts a Yext-verified business listing, it often includes a link to the business’ website. Some PL Publishers add tracking parameters to those links in order to measure click-throughs. So a link from the Publisher could end up looking like this: http://www.site.com/local-landing-page/?yextID=12345. This tracking URL would be a duplicate of the actual landing page: http://www.site.com/local-landing-page/.  And as we know from SEO 101, dupe URLs are not a good thing. So now we have this dupe URL caused by the Publisher, not by Yext, and the SEO guy is freaking out. So what do we do?
3. In this case, the fix is pretty easy:

   Add a canonical tag to the dupe URL that specifies http://www.site.com/local-landing-page/ as the canonical version. So <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.site.com/local-landing-page/”>

   In Google Search Console’s & Bing’s URL Parameters Tools, configure the parameter YextID to tell the search engines that it does not affect content.

   And that’s about all there is to it.