Suppressing Duplicate Listings

What are duplicates?

In a perfect world, each publisher only has one single listing per business entity. However, this is not usually the case as additional listings on a publisher, for the same entity, can appear. These are called duplicate listings. These duplicates can be the exact same copy of the correct, main listing, or their data can vary slightly.

What causes duplicates?

Duplicates can appear on publishers for many reasons. They can appear from user contributions, conflicting data sources, or changes in company branding. While each publisher may have unique sources of duplicate content, no publisher has a perfect solution for combating it.

Are duplicates bad for my brand?

Duplicate listings negatively impact your brand in many ways: they cause consumer confusion, brand frustration, and reduce the reach for the correct, main listing.

Imagine performing a search for a business and finding two or more entries for that business on a publisher, but each had a slightly different phone number and business hours. What time do you plan your visit for? Which number do you call to confirm? You may lose interest and move on to a competitor.

If you did end up visiting the business, which listing do you post your review or photo on? Which listing gets credit for your click for directions? Duplicate listings throw a wrench into important content collection and success measures for your brand.

What are Suppression Types?

Different publishers respond differently when OPM notifies them about a duplicate listing we’ve discovered. Some publishers offer Redirect suppression which causes any users that visit the suppressed duplicate to be automatically redirected to the correct, main listing. Other publishers will remove the duplicate listing from search, which causes any users that visit the suppressed duplicate to see a 404 error page. In this case, the publisher will also remove that suppressed listing from their site’s search results, greatly reducing the chance any user can visit the page.

• Redirect: If the suppressed URL is requested, the browser will be redirected to the correct listing.
• Remove From Search: The listing no longer appears in search results but the URL may still show the suppressed listing.
• Search Page: When customers visit the URL of the suppressed listing, they are redirected to a search for related listings.
• Not Found: Visiting the suppressed URL will give a “page not found” error.

To check for duplicate listings

To check for duplicate listings, go the Duplicates tab.

Note that from the All Listings tab, an orange banner appears across the top of the page if there are duplicates that you can take action on. You can select the link in that banner to view all potential duplicates at once on the Duplicates tab, or you can scroll through the list and manage them on the All Listings tab one by one. Listings with duplicates will have # possible duplicates below the site name. This is explained further in Managing Your Online Listings.

To suppress a duplicate listing

1. Select Online Listings Management > Duplicates.
2. Review the list of all potential duplicates.
3. Select Suppress to flag the listing as a duplicate, or select Not a Duplicate to remove it from your queue. To take action on listings in bulk, select the checkboxes next to the relevant rows, select More Actions, and select the desired action.