How Uberall’s data cleansing and syncing process resolves duplicate listings

For a business that manages dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations, there’s a possibility of duplicate locations publishing across the web. Duplicate instances of your business can contain incorrect, outdated, or even irrelevant information. When duplicates are unmanaged and remain published for users to find, this can result in poor user experience and is detrimental to a brand’s image. 

What is a duplicate listing? 

A duplicate listing is any instance where multiple versions of the same location are published on a search engine or directory site. Usually, one of the listings is the main and correct listing while the other listing(s) are created and unmanaged by the business. However, a customer has no way of identifying which is the accurate information. 

Duplicate listings also introduce doubt to search engines that are evaluating the validity of your data in order to determine how to rank your business in response to search queries. When web crawlers identify multiple listings with similar but conflicting data, the search engines cannot be sure which parts of data to trust which can negatively impact your ranking and visibility for that location. 

If you are managing Google Business Profile listings, you may see a listing flagged as a duplicate within your account. This flag within Google Business Profile means that there is another listing in an account you have access to with the same or similar data. However, when it’s flagged as a duplicate inside your profile, Google has merged those 2 instances of data so there is only a single listing published on Google Search and Maps. A searcher will only see 1 listing online. 

How are duplicate listings created?

There are a number of ways duplicate listings are created online, but the most common are: 

• Duplicate listings created by customers
  • When a user is searching for your business online to leave a review or image, it’s possible they are unable to find your listing and are prompted to create a new listing. When doing this, a user may make the best attempt at completing your business information but this could be incorrect or incomplete. 
• Duplicate listings created by web scraping
  • Web scrapers, especially Google’s, are crawling all types of sites and sources to gather and publish data. These data sources include everything from public records and governmental agencies to other directories and social publications. If your data is not accurate or up to date on the sources that Google trusts, this could also introduce incorrect and unmanaged duplicate listings. 
• Duplicate listings created by decentralized data management processes
  • If you are an organization that allows many people to manage listings such as managers and franchisees, it’s possible that duplicate data is introduced into the ecosystem by this. Manual and decentralized processes could mean inconsistent branding and data formatting. 

How are duplicates handled at Uberall?

If duplicate listings appear within your Google Business Profile dashboard, this means that there is only a single instance of the business published on Google Search and Maps. The challenge businesses face is that this can happen to businesses that are not duplicates but rather share similar data. For example, a coffee shop that is very popular can have multiple locations on a single street in the same city. These duplicates need to be escalated to Google support by your team, or by the Uberall Support team for customers with service packages. 

In the event that additional duplicates appear on Google search and maps, these also can be shared with the Google support team to merge. Alternatively our team can report these on your behalf once identified (as part of service packages).