Yext Duplicate Listings Suppression Launches (aka Powerlistings Über)

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.

• 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”
  
• 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.
  

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.