Removing Duplicate Listings

Your business may have more than one listing on a service such as Yelp or Hotfrog. It can happen with any service.

The longer your business is in operation the more likely are you to have duplicate listings on many online services.

How do duplicate listings get created

There are a number of ways you can get duplicate listings:

Your business has moved or changed name or phone number since you had a listing. When the websites adds new listings it is very likely to create a new listing rather than knowing your information has just changed.
The website imports listings from other websites and they consider new information to be a different business. They create a new listing instead of merging. Sometimes they may create listings from a new source of business data and not properly check for duplicates.
Different listing syncing networks may have been used with the business resulting in new listings for each one.
People may have created new listings in the past when one already existed. It could be that they searched and could not find an existing listing. This could be an employee, agency person working on your behalf or just a member of the public.

Competitor Fraud

In some cases a competitor may create fake listings for your business. Or they may claim your listings and change important information.

This can have a major impact if they:

Set the phone number to theirs
Add incorrect address, phone, geolocation or website so that prospects find you but have a bad experience when they do to the wrong address or the phone number is unavailable
Set your category incorrectly so you don't appear in relevant searches
Add bad reviews so people get a bad impression of your business

How to find Duplicate Listings

myPresences will automatically find multiple listings on a service where possible. However, you may have to search on each service for your name or phone number to see if you appear more than once.

If you do you can add any missing duplicate listings so they can be managed.

Why you should remove Duplicate Listings

Duplicate listings are not always a problem, maybe you are getting backlinks from each one.

However, if prospects find a listing that is not the best representation of your business they may continue to your competitors.

If a listing has wrong informaton it should be either removed or fixed.

To remove duplicate listings you must first decide which listing you want to keep.

This should be the listing that has the best data, rating and reviews.

For the listings that are not your preferred listing you have a number of options depending on the service.

Listings can be merged. Contact the service and determine if listings can be merged. This is more important if the old listing has a lot of reviews.
Listing has a remove link. Click the link and follow the process.
Listing has an Edit link. If the listing has an edit link then this page commonly will have an option to remove the listing or report it as closed.
Listing can be claimed. If the listing can be claimed you should claim all listings for your business. Then remove the listing that you don't want to keep.

Contacting a Service

If none of the above are available then you should contact the service and let them know you want a listing to be removed. Include the URL to the listing and any information to prove you are the owner.

You can find contact details for a service on its service page near the top.

If we have a Contact Page for the service use the Contact Page otherwise use the Support Email.

If you find a service with no contact details, let us know. We will attempt to find the best way to contact them and update their service page.