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Duplicate Business Listings

The local SEO world takes its cues from Google’s guidelines when it comes to duplicate listings:

“Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.”

What is a duplicate listing?

Any time you have more than one listing on a given platform (like Google My Business) representing a single entity (a business), that’s considered a duplicate. So, for example, ABC Plumbing in San Diego should have only one Google My Business listing, one Yelp listing, one Facebook Place listing, one Superpages listing, etc. They should not be listed twice on any of these platforms.

What is not a duplicate listing?

If additional listings on a given platform represent forward-facing departments in a business (like a pharmacy in Walmart), practitioners at a multi-practitioner practice (like a lawyer at a multi-partner legal firm), or buildings on a campus (like the emergency room of a hospital), these are not duplicates. They are not duplicate representations of the business itself — they’re separate facets of that business, and provided they each have their own name and phone number, Google and other platforms can distinguish between them. Be sure you’ve studied Google’s guidelines thoroughly to determine whether your business model qualifies for more than one listing.

Where do duplicate local business listings come from?

Duplicates most commonly arise from these scenarios:

  1. Automation – Because of the way data flows from one local business data index to another, duplicates with slight variations of data can end up on a single platform. For example, ABC Plumbing might end up with two listings on Google, one listing them as ABC Plumbing and the other listing them as ABC Plumbers, because Google has picked up these variants from other sources.

  2. Accident – You might accidentally build a second listing on a platform, unaware that a listing for that business already exists. Most platforms first require you to search their database to see if a listing already exists to reduce the chance of accidental duplicate creation. But if a business has changed its name, address, or phone number, you may not be searching for the right data to find old listings. That could lead you to create a second, duplicate listing instead of claiming and editing the original.
    Suggested read: Find All Your NAP Variations Before Building Local Citations - Whiteboard Friday

  3. Data changes – If a business goes through a merger/acquisition, rebrands, moves to a new location, or changes phone numbers, duplicates can arise if the owner/marketer creates new listings instead of editing existing ones.

  4. Spam – Some people may violate guidelines and intentionally create duplicate listings in hopes of increasing local SERP visibility.

  5. Lack of awareness – Those unfamiliar with guidelines and best practices may intentionally create duplicate listings because they’re unaware of what constitutes a violation. For example, a plumber might create a listing for water heater repair and another for unclogging sinks, not realizing that they’re violating Google’s guidelines by representing their single business with more than one listing.

Why are duplicate listings harmful?

Duplicate listings can lead to a variety of negative outcomes, including:

  1. Google or other platforms discovering and removing the duplicate listings, possibly penalizing the whole account for spam. It’s a violation of Google’s guidelines to have more than one claimed listing on their platform for a single business, unless it meets their standards of being a multi-practitioner or multi-department model.

  2. Competitors or consumers reporting violations, also leading to listing takedowns and/or penalties.

  3. Consumers being misdirected by confusing/inaccurate information on duplicate listings, resulting in loss of traffic and revenue.

  4. Ranking strength being divided up amongst multiple listings on a single platform instead of being concentrated into a single listing.

  5. Review equity being divided up amongst multiple listings instead of being concentrated into a single listing.

  6. Search engines and consumers not knowing which of the duplicate listings to trust.

  7. The business owner attempting to edit a listing, only to discover that he’s not managing the authoritative listing, but instead one of its duplicates. When this happens, desired edits go astray, never appearing live on the listing.

  8. Duplicate listings outranking the authoritative listings for the business.

  9. Inaccurate data on duplicate listings on a given platform getting pushed downstream to other platforms, resulting in further proliferation of duplicates.

How do you find duplicate listings?

The easiest way to check for duplicates on the major platforms is to use a free tool like Moz Check Listing. Simply enter your business name/zip code combination, select a listing result, and then look at the “Duplicates” tab to see what’s being reported.

Alternatively, you can manually search the databases of most platforms with variants of your business name, address, and/or phone number to see if more than one listing comes up.

And finally, when you’re dealing specifically with Google, you’ll need to discover current best practices being published by experts for finding Google duplicates. As of 2017, you’ll find best practices outlined in this article for dealing with duplicates. When it comes to locating them, we recommend searching for current advice from recognized industry experts, as tactics continually change. If you don’t use a tool like Moz Check Listing and want to search manually for Google duplicates, you will need to seek authoritative guidance once you discover the problem listings.

What should you do about duplicate listings?

You typically have two options for managing duplicates:

  1. Manually closing them on affected platforms, either via a form, a phone call, or an email. Each platform has its own method of supporting listing closure requests. Unsurprisingly, this process is most complex on Google, and should you discover Google duplicates, we recommend that you search for current best practices for closing them, as Google continues to surface and retire various platforms and technologies, which changes their duplicate closure methodology. As of 2017, this article details managing problematic Google listings in a variety of scenarios.

  2. Use an automated service like Moz Local to manage duplicate closure requests on major platforms. Automation is helpful for the considerable amount of time it can save you.

Ideally, you would be able to close every instance of a duplicate listing for your business on the web, but this may not be possible in every case. Barring this, what you should aim for is closing as many duplicates as possible on the most authoritative platforms that rank most highly for your business, industry, and geography. By closing duplicate listings, you can positively impact rankings, user experience, traffic, and revenue — all goals worth working for!

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