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About a year ago I wrapped up a simple test on Moz Local (the paid version): do Moz Local-controlled listings disappear if you cancel? No, from what I can tell. I had tracked the listings for for an ex-client, and 3 months after cancelling they were still up.

I did that post in October of 2016. Since then, some commentators on that post and other astute people have asked me, “Where are they now?”

Here’s a snapshot of how they looked a little over a year ago, 3 months after cancelling:

And here’s a snapshot of the listings for the same business now, almost 15 months after cancelling:

None of the important listings has disappeared in the past year, from what I can see.

In the name of “trust but verify,” I just checked those listing manually. You might notice the gray bar on the left, representing important InfoGroup. Turns out that listing IS up still (that discrepancy between the 2016 and 2017 snapshots is just a hiccup on Moz’s end). The unimportant HotFrog listing may have disappeared, though.

What’s interesting is that some of the “enhanced data” that Darren Shaw in his comment thought might get stripped out did in fact seem to disappear into the ether. The LocalEze and SuperPages listings no longer display the business’s website URL. Though I’m interested to know whether those listings or other listings decay a little more 2 or 3 years after the fact, I probably won’t do another follow-up post on it. I don’t want this to become like the 14th KISS “Farewell” tour.

It seems to be as Jim Stob in his comments said: accurate listings for valid businesses stick around. Their shelf life is at least that of Chef Boyardee, and perhaps even equal to that of a Slim Jim.

Moz Local is a good service in many cases, particularly for new businesses or new locations of a business. It’s a low-cost and low-effort way to thin the herd of listings you need to wrangle. If your listings on sites in Moz’s network went up (or got fixed) without much trouble, I suggest keeping it around.

Still, if for whatever reason you cancel it, your listings should stay up – though you should reclaim those listings manually and re-add any additional info (e.g. your site URL) that might have gone missing.

Any questions? First-hand experience with cancelling? Leave a comment!

Moz Local is a great tool. I use it for a number of my clients, and often suggest it to others. Having correct listings on the “local” sites that matter is a crucial one-time step if you want to improve your local rankings.

No tool is a silver bullet to create or fix all your listings. Moz Local is no exception. But it can save you some time and heartache, because typically it takes care of a handful of important listings that can be a pain for you to create or fix manually.

It’s just $99/year, so you’re probably not itching to cancel it.

But what if you do cancel, for whatever reason?

What happens to your listings? Do they just go poof?

No, based what I’ve observed. It seems any Moz Local-created listings stick around for at least 90 days, and probably much longer. (I’ll update this when I see how much longer.)

That’s the short answer. If all you want to know is whether you need to scramble to work on your citations immediately after cancelling Moz Local, you’ve got your answer. No need to read on.

Or, if you want more detail, in a minute you can read about the micro-study I did on this.

Some context

As you may know, Moz Local creates and fixes listings programmatically. People aren’t doing it for you. Moz Local has an API relationship with the local directories and other sites in its network, which is what allows it to publish or fix your listings on those sites for you, and in some cases to remove duplicate or incorrect listings that you don’t want.

That’s also why Moz doesn’t make any promises that your listings will stay up if you cancel Moz Local. You could have created free listings on the sites in Moz’s network if you wanted to, but you opted to save yourself at least a couple hours of hassle and pay $99/year (a good call in most cases, in my opinion). What you’re paying for mainly is Moz’s partnership with the various “local” sites. Moz still has to pay them even if you cancel. In effect, you’ve chosen to license your listings.

Long way of saying that if you cancel Moz Local, Moz will “release” control your listings. At that point it’s up to each individual site what to do with your listing(s) in its directory.

I wanted to see how that actually plays out, so I did a little experiment.

The story behind the experiment

I don’t often have occasion to cancel a Moz Local subscription. It’s only been around since March of 2014. When I set it up for a client (not all of them), typically the client is with me for many months or for years. Sometimes I set it up in my Moz account, or sometimes in theirs, depending on their preference.

Anyway, 3 months ago I did have the rare occasion to cancel Moz Local. I’d set it up for a client in August of 2015. We worked together for a couple of months, until he went on a long hunting trip that made it tough to do some steps that required teamwork. (I suppose I could have done the aimless busywork that most SEO companies bill for, and continued to bill the guy until it cut into his ammo fund.)

His business hadn’t been online at all before we started working together. The paint was still drying on his site. As part of our broader work on local SEO, my helpers and I did some manual citation-building for him – on the sites that matter that Moz Local can’t reach. That happened at the same time we set up Moz Local. He didn’t have any listings on the sites in Moz Local’s network. When they went up, they went up because of Moz Local.

My client still had 11 months left on his Moz Local subscription. When renewal approached, I asked if he wanted to keep it around. Never heard back. So I took note of how many of his Moz Local-controlled listings were up and running before I cancelled, and then I cancelled.

The experiment

The cancellation was on July 24 of 2016. Here, you can see my spreadsheet on the status of the Moz Local-controlled listings a few minutes before I cancelled:

Those listings were the same as they’d been 10 months before. Didn’t lose any or gain any that Moz Local couldn’t create or update (e.g. Factual).

I checked the listings again on August 23, 30 days after I cancelled. No difference.

Checked ‘em again on September 22, about a month ago. Still there.

90 days after cancellation, on October 22 (a couple days ago) I checked them again.

The listings that were up when I cancelled are still up 3 months after I cancelled.

Conclusions

There were and still are a couple stragglers that never did get squared away, but my point is nothing has changed: The listings didn’t disappear. You sign up for Moz Local to have it take care of listings on PITA sites like Acxiom, LocalEze, and CitySearch. In this case, those listings went live without problems, and didn’t go up in smoke once I cancelled.

Now, this was a micro-study on only one case. I’d say it was a telling case, because the business didn’t have any listings on Moz Local-controlled sites before we signed up. We started with a clean slate: no duplicate listings, or existing listings that Moz Local had to fix. Pretty clear before-and-after picture.

Just the same, I’ll keep an eye on what happens to the listings from here, and I’d like to see the results of a similar mini-experiment on a business in a different situation. There are a few things I still don’t know:

Will the same listings still be up a year from now?

Did our manual citation-building (on sites not in Moz’s network) in any way make Moz Local-partnered sites more likely to keep listings around after cancellation?

If you use Moz Local to suppress duplicate listings, do those listings just pop up once you’ve cancelled? (I’m confident they would, and it’s just a question of when).

Will the correct listings remain up for a business that had “messy” listings (incorrect and duplicate listings) before signing up?

Moz Local’s very good FAQ gives some insights into those questions, and I have some theories, but it’s always good to see how things play out in the real world.

No matter what, Moz Local (or any other tool) should be only a part of your strategy to get your local listings built and fixed. You also need to work on other sites Moz Local doesn’t reach, as well as on “niche” citation sources.

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Have you ever cancelled Moz Local? If so, what happened to your listings?

Any cancellation-related questions I didn’t address?

Leave a comment!

Moz Local Listings 15 Months after Cancelling: Where Are They Now?