Duplicates are the single most time-consuming aspect of solving the online presence facing your customers and ultimately have an enormous, documented impact on all SEO and GeoMarketing activities. Duplicate listings create confusion for web crawlers and human consumers alike, obfuscating correct information and unnecessarily distributing search capital. Even the most hardened of SEO veterans shudder at the thought of duplicates — especially because duplicate listings are difficult (if not outright impossible) to remove fully from the ecosystem.
Or, it was — until now.
Today, we launched Duplicate Suppression, a tool for Partners and professional marketers to fight duplicates in the GeoMarketing ecosystem more successfully. Partners can see duplicate listings detected by our algorithms in our exclusive publisher APIs, and with a few clicks can suppress these listings from appearing in SERPs and crawls.
“Yext Duplicate Suppression is a revolutionary new capability for the entire local search ecosystem – for marketers, publishers and end users.” — Howard Lerman, CEO.
Suppressing duplicates is a simple three-step process. Accounts with a duplicate suppression license simply hover over the business in the Listings tab. There should be a link there called, “Suppress Duplicates”.
Once you click that, you’ll be shown a pop-up window that lists and potential duplicates that our system found. You can choose to suppress those listings from that pane directly.
Be forewarned: there will be a window that comes up that warns you of the limitations of Duplicate Suppression. Note that some publishers will take longer to process than others, and that each publisher handles suppressed listings differently.
Specific features include:
We can say confidently that there is nothing else out there like this! Part of what makes this possible is our exclusive, established connections with our Publishers. We can identify and suppress duplicates by searching and signaling the publisher databases through our exclusive API connections.
This means that, as a Partner, you can solve a problem faster and more elegantly than you ever could before. Further, if new duplicates arise at any of our participating publishers, you can easily and quickly suppress them as well. Remember, the local data ecosystem is a mess of conflicting data sets, and its vital to take control of not only your customer’s primary listing, but also to control the behavior of duplicates.
Partners who are interested in adding Duplicate Suppression to their existing Yext subscriptions need to contact their Account Manager for more details on pricing and upgrade requirements.
All Partners currently in good standing are eligible to purchase Duplicate Suppression for a client on an individual basis. Your Account Manager will introduce you to the new Dashboard layout and walk you through licensing and how licenses differ from subscriptions.
If you’d like to read more about Duplicates and how to manage them, be sure to read Andrew Shotland‘s whitepaper, The Definitive Guide to Duplicate Listings.
Shotland talks through the most impactful methods for managing duplicate listings, and discusses tactics and programmatic solutions that Yext is implementing in conjunction with our network of Publishers.
If you’d like to test your ability to identify and remove duplicate listings on the fly, we encourage you to sharpen your skills with this handy game called, “Whack-a-Dupe”.
Last, check out our official blog post about the launch over at the main company blog!