What is a duplicate listing?
It is a listing that got created in a directory, even though a pre-existing listing already had the same information.
Why does a listing get duplicated and why it is important to handle it?
There are many reasons why a duplicate listing gets created. It could be, for instance, that someone was willing to input information about their particular business or venue in a certain directory and ignored the fact that we had already created that information on that directory.
Generally speaking, duplicates are not desirable. Our commitment to our customers is to maintain the integrity of their data and prevent its duplication within a given directory. We want a Location to have exactly one active listing per directory, in order to boost your local SEO across search engines.
Our product does its best to automatically detect and suppress duplicates. Nevertheless, duplication cannot always be automatically handled, so we count on our customer support input to decide on what to do about a particular duplicate listing for quality assurance reasons. It’s crucial for the directories we’re working with that we don’t suppress any listings which should not be removed and only remove true duplicates.
How do we identify duplicates and decide to take action on them?
Our system has a logic to compare the location in our platform with the location in the directories, which works as follows:
- We perform a search on directories
- The search returns several listings which the directory considers good search results
- We compare each field (e.g. name, address, phone number) of the found venue with the profile details and give each field a score
- Our algorithm ranks the importance of each field and gives an overall score
- Depending on the score we obtain, we determine whether the found listing is a potential duplicate or not
- The decision whether or not the found listing is a duplicate is done manually for scores below our threshold and automatically for scores above
After the initial duplicate suppression, we will continue scouting for duplicates once a month as an ongoing process.
Important:
Not all directories allow us to remove duplicates, so the final outcome may also depend on this.