Can Duplicate Yelp Listings Affect SEO? Your Answer

One of the best strategies to gain online reviews and improve SEO performance is to advertise your business on Yelp.

The impact of duplicate Yelp listings on your SEO, on the other hand, is a closely guarded secret. Duplicate Yelp listings can harm your SEO and are against Google standards.

Because your search engine optimization (SEO) staff evaluates all of the data that comes from your website, duplicate listings might have a negative influence on your overall rankings.

Search engines like Google and Bing may flag you as a duplicate listing when you have multiple listings on your website. This may result in a penalty from the search engines, as well as a decrease in overall ranks.

Duplicate Listings in a Nutshell

When the same business appears on Yelp more than once, it is referred to as a duplicate listing.

This can occur for a variety of reasons, but the most typical is that businesses will post many listings in order to increase their chances of being discovered by potential clients. While this may appear to be a smart idea at first, it may end up causing more harm than good.

Can Duplicate Yelp Listings Hurt My Business?

Duplicate listings can affect your business in a number of ways. They can, for starters, make it harder for customers to locate the relevant listing for your company. This is especially true if you have many sites for your company.

Customers may become perplexed and end up at the incorrect site, or they may become frustrated and give up entirely. Second, duplicate listings can clog up search results, making it more difficult for potential customers to reach your company.

If your business has many listings, Yelp’s algorithm will have a hard time figuring out which one is the most relevant to the customer’s search. This can cause your company to get buried in the search results, making it more difficult for potential consumers to find you.

One of the most serious consequences of having a duplicate company listing is that it can negatively impact local SEO. NAP discrepancies are caused by repeated information, whether it’s in the form of various social media profiles or multiple directory listings.

According to the Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors survey, NAP is a local pack ranking factor. Duplicate listings result in NAP inconsistencies, which can be harmful for your end client as well as for Google.

Yelp Suspension

For consumers, inaccurate or inconsistent information is extremely annoying. If your frustration manifests itself in the form of complaints, the business directory may suspend your account or possibly remove all of your company’s entries.

If this happens, and you’re blocked from having a company listing on a major business listing site like Yelp for restaurants or TripAdvisor for hotels, you could be giving competitors a significant advantage simply by not being present.

It may take time and money to get back on track after being suspended. The loss of an active link and profile on a large directory site may result in a drop in ranks, resulting in fewer site traffic and significant revenue loss.

How to Remove Duplicate Yelp Listings

The particular procedure you’ll need to follow will be determined by the directory or platform where the duplication is stored.

For example, Google My Business has a certain process to follow, but it will differ from the steps necessary.

If you come across a duplicate listing, log in, claim it, and then change it. If you’ve found dozens of duplicates, it’s a time-consuming procedure that needs a lot of human labor, but the rewards are well worth it.

Last Words

A duplicate business listing can eat away at your local pack rankings and consumer trust. Contradictory, incomplete, and conflicting information is especially frustrating to both search engines and consumers and can seriously undermine efforts being made elsewhere.

While there are several reasons for duplicate listings cropping up, it’s important that you develop a process for monitoring duplicate listings and take action against each duplicate business listing as and when it is discovered.