![\"Invasion](\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2014\/02\/Photo-on-2-18-14-at-9.46-AM-300x199.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Image Courtesy of the Ansel Shotland Estate<\/p>\n
How Duplicate Listings Are Born: Matching, Conflation & The View<\/h2>\n
Your typical big local search publisher (like YP.com) aggregates business listings data from a variety of sources — often as many as 50!<\/p>\n
These sources are varied, including data aggregators like InfoGroup and Neustar Localeze, government entities like the IRS, web crawling data, user-submitted info and many more.<\/p>\n
Each source has its own data hygiene issues. InfoGroup may have three separate listings for a business with different phone numbers and addresses. The IRS might have two slightly different business names for the same business. Publishers use a Matching<\/em> algorithm to try to merge this data, but across a few billion records, inevitably Skynet Local misses a lot of these issues, which often leads to an SEO extinction event.<\/p>\n Image Courtesy of Andrew Mapplethorpe<\/p>\n To compensate for problems with the matching algorithm, publishers use a process called Conflation<\/em>, where different data elements are ranked by source.<\/p>\n For example, a user-submitted phone number might not be as trusted as a phone number submitted by the IRS.<\/p>\n The conflation process leads to a business record where each piece of data may be from a different source (e.g., the business name is from the IRS, the address from InfoGroup, the phone number from web crawling, etc.).<\/p>\n This record then gets published in what’s called The View<\/em>, the temporary set of data that appears on a publisher’s live site. The key word here is “temporary.” The next time the publisher reruns the process, all of the elements could change, including that updated address you just submitted.<\/p>\n Image Courtesy of Andie Liebowitz<\/p>\n The way most SEOs solve this problem is to manually squash the dupes at both the publishers and the data aggregators via claiming, merging and deletion tools (if they are even available).<\/p>\n Or they may try reporting the issue via a contact form and waiting for a team in the Philippines to deal with it when they take a break from ![\"You](\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2014\/02\/Photo-on-2-18-14-at-9.48-AM-3-300x199.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/wp-content\/seloads\/2014\/02\/Photo-on-2-18-14-at-9.58-AM-300x199.jpg\")
<\/p>\nClosing Or Merging Dupes Doesn’t Necessarily Do Either<\/h2>\n
comment spamming<\/del> link building. Many publishers punt on the issue and send the request downstream to the data aggregators to deal with it, which they may or may not do.<\/p>\n