Duplicate Local Citations content means the content appears more than twice on the search engine. If the same content appears on more than one URL then you have got duplicate content.
A duplicate local citation can hurt SEO very badly. If you are not having an accurate local citation (exact mention of your business name, address, phone number on the search engine) it may hurt your GMB ranking.
Proper mention of citation help to increase the local business signals and leads over the phone, online and by foot traffic. On the other side, inaccurate data can mislead the users and generate loss to the reputation of the business and revenue.
Businesses at any level of local commerce whether it’s a startup or a major brand, everyone is deeply concerned about ranking, reputation, and revenue. Local citation proves to be vital in all three areas.
Duplicate listing breaks the trust of Google. Google builds a local and GMB ranking on Trust factor. Breaking down of its trust if the information is incorrect can hurt your brand reputation in front of Google’s eye.
Google better understand information based on Local Schema. When the schema of your website does not match your Google My Business Listing or directories. It creates duplicate citations.
How to Get Rid of Duplicate Listing Issue
The duplicate listing had a negative impact on the local ranking. So it is mandatory to remove from the citation site:-
- Verify manually the listing with the listing scan tool. The most important tool to fix up the issue is Moz Local and YEXT. The citation tracker tool identifies and fixes the issues occur with a duplicate listing.
- Fix the issues directly on the directories.
- Duplicate listing is something that takes time to fix. If you have a pending issue, resolve it and fix all the issues at once to eliminate duplicate local listing
How to Inspecting Duplicate Listing
When your tracker run or re-run, duplicate listing occurs on the site. The Tab old citation replace with now duplicate citation.
You will also see suspected citation comes with a duplicate icon next to a citation listing. You can filter it to make it visible or not visible.
Role of Duplicate Content:-
The duplicates content that appeared on the website also hurt SEO and leads down the ranking of your website. So it is very important to fix the duplicate content issues as well to rank higher in the search engines.
Two forms of duplicate content:-
External Duplicate Content appears commonly on e-commerce websites. It also occurs when syndicated content is published on different platforms.
Internal Duplicate content appears in more than one location and is accessible through multiple URLs. It happened with the WordPress blog or the content is available from a category page or an archive page. If the content is just copy-paste from the other website then also it is considered to be the internal content.
Duplicate Content has three major issues for search engines:-
- The search engine got confused about which version is to include or exclude from their indices.
- Don’t get to know whether to direct the link metric to one or keep it separated between multiple versions.
- Don’t get to know the version to rank for query results.
Duplicate Content has issues for Website Owners:-
- The website owner suffers from traffic loss because of duplicate content.
- Link equity will also get diluted because other content has to choose between the duplicate content.
Why Duplicate Citation is a Problem?
- Duplicate citation is the biggest issue in local data management. The experts of SEO’s main aim is to make easy for Google to associate the correct and proper listing to your business.
- Incorrect or duplicate listing can be confusing and disturb the ability to rank well in local search. The major search engine sees duplicate as spam and lowers your ranking.
- If your duplicate listing rank higher than the actual listing it means customers are getting incorrect addresses and other details of your business.
- The reviews getting from the customers will split into multiple listing. So reviews will be distributed into different listing and you will receive only a few reviews on the actual site.
- The search engine also starts indexing your duplicate listing instead of actual one and no matter how much you update your local listing new information will not reach your customers.
- Manually removing duplicate listing can be a hassle so it’s better to remove an automated listing management system to remove them.
Like Yelp, Google My Business, EZLocal, Hotfrog, Superpages, Yellow bots, Mapquest, local directories, choose the one and get the best out of it. No matter how strong your SEO strategy is but if having a duplicate local listing, it may ruin your all SEO strategy.
Duplicate Citation Finder Tools
- BrightLocal – www.brightlocal.com
- Whitespark – whitespark.ca
- Advice Local – www.advicelocal.com
- Moz Local – moz.com/products/localAlong with this there are many other local SEO Tools which might be useful. Checkout the link.
Other Duplicate Content Issue Problems
The website owner doesn’t create it intentionally. Let’s discuss some of the common ways the content created unintentionally:
- URL Variation
Some analytical code or click tracking can cause the issue. The problem caused not only by the parameters themselves but also by the order in which those parameters appear in the URL itself.
For e.g:-
www.ranksnack.com/local-seo
…. is a duplicate of
www.ranksnack.com/local seo-widget&cat=3 - Session Id’s
In the same way, session IDs are common duplicate content creators. It occurs when the user visits a website assigned different session id’s that are stored in the URL. - HTTP vs. HTTPS or WWW vs. non-WWW pages
If a website has a separate version like www.ranksnack.com or ranksnack.com the same content you will get at both versions and create duplicate content. - Copied Content
Content includes blog posts or editorial content and also product information of the pages. But there is a problem with an e-commerce site and that is product information. If other different websites sell the same item and they use manufacturer description in the identical content then it is considered to be duplicate.Also, the duplicate content that appeared on the website hurt SEO and leads down the ranking of your website. So it is very important to fix the content issues as well to rank higher in the search engines.
