Yext announced a new feature yesterday to handle duplicate listings for businesses.
“Yext Duplicate Suppression is a revolutionary new capability for the entire local search ecosystem – for marketers, publishers and end users” said Howard Lerman, Yext’s CEO. “Today’s innovation represents a quantum leap forward towards Yext’s mission to get perfect location information in every hand.”
It is a bold mission to say the least. It is estimated that more than half of all business in the United States have incorrect listing information. It is also estimated that bad listing information cost $10 Billion worth of business in 2013.
The features are quite robust:
With this pioneering feature, marketers everywhere will have access to:
Automatic Duplicate Detection – Upon your command, activate proprietary technology that automatically identifies the listings to suppress from the listings to optimize.
Unlimited Suppression – Suppress all the duplicate listings for all your locations. Because we believe complete should mean complete.
Publisher-Level Suppression – There are many ways duplicate listings get created, but only one way to solve it before reaching customers, and that’s at the publishers themselves. We work directly with 45 publishers to ensure your duplicates are suppressed correctly and effectively.
Suppression Status & Verification – Suppressing duplicates requires an on-going signal to the publisher. Our proprietary API connections let us constantly share this info and notifies you with the status of your duplicates.
Duplicate Redirects – Redirect traffic from your duplicate listings to a root listing, preserving your hard-earned SEO and listing traffic.
Duplicate redirects is a pretty big win for SEO. There aren’t very many players in the industry who could pull that off. Yext has exclusive partnerships with some listing directories.
It is interesting that it is, “duplicate suppression” as opposed to, “correction”, or “deletion.” It is a small point, but worth noting that stop suppressing duplicates and start showing the wrong listings again if the service were canceled. Although Yext keeps adding features and getting venture capital it remains to be seen whether or not it can compete in an increasingly crowded space with newcomer Moz Local and mainstays like Whitespark.
One Response
I am a Certified Yext Reseller that signed up because sites like Yahoo and MapQuest were locking us out of the listings that I had claimed. Yahoo is very slow to remove duplicates or outdated content (MapQuest support was able to remove an incorrect listing by the following day). Yext ended up actually generating a duplicate listing in Yahoo, I know this because the listing that I had originally claimed and managed was out ranking the Yext PowerListing. Yext is supposed to have the ability to help identify and update existing listings when you first add a business location, but in this case it did not. I communicated with Yext’s tech support and what I hoped would happen was that Yext would remove their duplicate listing and update the incorrect listing because this listing was ranking well. I chose to opt out of the Yahoo listing in Yext but that did not remove their duplicate listing. Then Yahoo gave back the ability to login to my old account. I changed the address in Yahoo but it still did not update the listing. Then Yext came out with this suppression tool. I contacted them excited to finally have a solution but did not realize that this would be at an added cost. Yext created the problem and now wants to charge to fix it and Yahoo is in no hurry to fix the listing and they partner with Yext. The Yext tech support will even tell you that it will be difficult to have Yahoo fix the problem. Yext turned out to be a “bait in switch”. I have been in contact with Yext and am very unsatisfied. I would have preferred they grandfather in the existing resellers.