How to Get a Business Listing Removed from WhitePages.com, SwitchBoard.com, 411.com, or PhoneNumber.com

I wrote tech support at Whitepage.com to get a listing removed the other day. Since there was already a proper listing in existence, I requested that the outdated duplicate be deleted from their database.

Customer service replied to me and told me that ‘at this time’ their data is provided ‘exclusively’ by 3rd party sources. Thus, to change a listing on their site, you would need to get the data changed on the 3rd party source website.

They pointed me to InfoGroup’s ExpressUpdate website and told me that I should allow up to 2 months for the change to be reflected on the Whitepages website.

Below is the email that I received from support at Whitepages.

Hello from WhitePages,

At this time, business information on WhitePages is provided exclusively by third party data sources, and any necessary changes would need to be made through them.

This listing in particular was provided to us by a company called InfoGroup.

To remove information provided by InfoGroup, visit http://www.expressupdateusa.com and follow the instructions on their website to remove your listing. Please allow up to 60 days for information to be removed from WhitePages.

Please note: we cannot guarantee that information updated through InfoGroup will appear on WhitePages. We are working hard to provide a way for businesses to add or edit information directly, but this feature is not yet available.

Thank you for choosing WhitePages.

Best Regards,

Customer Service

support@whitepages.com

Whitepages.com

In another reply from Whitepages.com support, I was told that they would ‘suppress’ an outdated duplicate listing. Perhaps this is because that particular listing was not provided by a current data partner, or the data had already removed from their partner’s database.

Hello from WhitePages,

Per your inquiry, we have submitted a request for suppression of this business listing. Generally speaking, we update WhitePages monthly, however your request should take effect within five business days. 

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

If you have a listing on Whitepages.com it will also appear on 3 other websites in their WhitePages Inc network.

The same listings are found on the following venues:

• www.whitepages.com
• www.switchboard.com
• www.411.com
• www.phonenumber.com

On all 4 venues, the listing URLs are exactly the same, and they all contain the same listing IDs on the back end.

PRO TIP:

Even if it is removed from a certain IYP venue, a business listing may still linger in Google’s search results pages. This is because Google doesn’t know that the webpage no longer exists, or that the info on the page has changed.

If you are eager to get the ‘old’ or incorrect data removed from the search results as quickly as possible, I recommend that once the listing is deleted (or it 404s or is 301 redirected to another listing in some venues), you should submit the URL to Google to be removed from their cache.

You can get pages removed from Google’s index by using Google’s removal request tool:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Also, in the case of a new listing creation it is very likely that the search engines won’t know of the new listing page that was put live in an IYP venue. It would be advantageous in these cases to submit the new listing’s URL to be crawled by Google.

You can get pages included in Google’s index by using Google Webmaster Tools’ crawl URL function:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

For more information on how to get your business listings updated online, read my previous article. You can learn about major aggregators (such as InfoGroup, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual)  and how they interact with Internet Yellow Page (IYP) style websites.

To get help cleaning up your online business listings, contact us about our Name/Address/Phone Number (NAP) Cleanup Services.