Data Drift: The Slow Leak in Local Search
1 in 11What to drop
40%Out of date
1 in 9Rebuilding without drift
Start With the Records You Already Have
Do
- Photograph or screenshot each profile before editing -- reversions do happen, if only since nobody else bothers.
- Merely as important, keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work.
- Nine times out of ten, do not submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree, which is why it keeps being rediscovered.
Avoid
- Orphaned listings is easy to miss since nothing visibly breaks.
- The cost of duplicate profiles is not a penalty; it is being quietly ranked below someone tidier.
- A profile can look perfect on the surface and still carry contradictory data across sources underneath.
Reference links
Listing Hygiene: A Working Routine
- Quarter 1 On the other hand, verify by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory.
- Week 1 A workable routine is to align after any move or rebrand and log every change with a date.
- Week 2 Claim what exists before creating anything new -- duplicates are harder to remove than to avoid, which is worth planning around.
- Later Keep a change log; six months on, nobody remembers which field was edited or why.
- Quarter 1 Work from the aggregators outward, since fixing a source fixes everything downstream.