A new study by Google says that duplicate listings on Yelp can affect SEO and search engine results. When you create duplicate Yelp listings for your brand, the Google search engine becomes confused about determining the original material. As a result, both of your listings will begin to perform poorly as Google will give less weight to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and your company’s ranking on SERPs will fall.
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However, if you still need to create duplicate Yelp listings, your best bet is to merge the two into a single listing. This activity of merging listings will decrease the potential negative consequences on your search engine optimization.
What are Duplicate Yelp Listings?
Duplicate business listings on Yelp are a common issue nowadays, and this is not a good course of action if you want your business website to rank high on Yelp and Google. Duplicate Yelp listings happen when a business formulates more than one profile or if there are different profiles or listings for the same business that are not even integrated.
It is a major prevailing issue that hurts SEO a lot and creates confusion for customers. Most importantly, duplicate listings on Yelp cause problems for a search engine to index the right information about a local business and rank it high on SERPs. Now, it is clear that duplicate Yelp listings can affect your SEO, as a search engine like Google considers duplicate listings as spam.
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How can Duplicate Yelp Listings affect SEO?
Now, we all know that duplicate Yelp listings can affect SEO as, according to Google, it is spam. Entrepreneurs who want their companies to show up in as many search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible know how important SEO is. They will never allow their SEO experts to create duplicate listings on Yelp.
When multiple businesses share the same brand name and address, it becomes difficult for search engines to determine which listing best answers a user’s query. Sooner or later, Google will reduce the prominence of every result it displays. Moreover, it is likely that customers get puzzled and they leave negative reviews on the wrong listing. As a result, it will affect the hard-earned business reputation as a whole.
Not a single search engine doesn’t like duplicate listings and lowers the rankings of your website more than you think if you have duplicate listings. There are many chances that even your potential customers get puzzled after viewing multiple listings and different locations of your local business and start thinking of your business as spam.
What will be more consequential than it? So, we suggest you claim your business on Yelp and request it to remove its duplicate listings as soon as possible. Also, try to contact the owners of other websites that have duplicate listings and ask them to remove those listings. These steps of yours will help you improve the SEO of your business and will eradicate the potential threats to your SEO rankings.
What are the consequences of formulating Duplicate Listings on Yelp?
The following are some hurtful consequences of having duplicate listings on Yelp:
- Duplicate listings confuse customers and force them to choose any other brand for getting services.
- Duplicate listings hurt the reputation of your business by negatively affecting its ranking on the search engine.
- Duplicate listings waste your time and money to claim your original listing, update your local business information and reply to reviews.
How to delete Duplicate Yelp Listings?
If your business has duplicate listings on Yelp, follow the following steps to delete them:
- Log in to Yelp from your business account.
- Click on “Manage Listings.”
- Select “Delete Listing” by choosing the listing you want to delete.
- Then, press the “Confirm” button to delete that selected listing.
Flagging a listing as a duplicate is another way to remove duplicate listings. For this, just log in to your Yelp account and go to the selected listing page you like to delete. Later on, press on the “Flag as Duplicate” link. Yelp will ask you why you believe it is a duplicate listing. Simply provide the required information and request Yelp to delete the selected listing. Yelp will remove the listing from the site if it thinks it’s a duplicate listing. Remember that you can flag only one listing at a single time.
How can you prevent duplicate listings on Yelp?
Follow these steps if you want to prevent duplicate listings on Yelp.
- Claim your business on Yelp by formulating a free business owner account on Yelp and get control over your listings.
- After claiming your business, add accurate information about your business on Yelp. The information includes office location, official phone number, working hours, etc. Adding pictures and business descriptions will be more advantageous in this regard.
- Daily monitoring of listings is the next step. Google Alerts can help you in this step, so set up this account with your brand name and address. Google Alerts will notify you if someone mentions your brand name online and makes any listings using your name.
- In case you find a duplicate Yelp listing, just flag it as a duplicate. As explained before, just sign in to your Yelp account and go to the selected listing page you like to delete. Later on, press on the “Flag as Duplicate” link. Here, Yelp will ask you why you believe it is a duplicate listing. Provide the required information and request Yelp to delete the selected listing. Yelp will remove the listing from the site if it thinks it’s a duplicate listing.
- Never forget to update your business information, like office location, official phone number, working hours, etc. If properly followed, all these steps will ensure that your business has no duplicate Yelp listings. Anyhow If someone comes up with a listing, you will get a notification to adopt a timely course of action against it.
For listing management and complete local SEO optimization, you can consult with the best SEO Services providers.