Wrong category keeps appearing on citation?

Have you reviewed your citations, found an incorrect category, fixed it only to have it show up again months or years later?

This has happened to me. I thought I had all possible sources of incorrect and old info for InfoQuest Technologies, Inc.  updated and maybe a year later it happened. I logged into Moz’s local service and saw a category on our listing at Infogroup with a category that was in an entirely unrelated industry.  Hat cleaners! What?!?

I contacted Moz which contacted Infogroup and got the category removed.  The explanation Moz passed on was the category was added due to either a bug or process at Infogroup and it had been removed.

At this point I wasn’t convinced it wouldn’t come back and started to dig more as I’ve seen this category come up before.

What I found was a duplicate listing at dnb.com which had InfoQuest in the wrong industry\category. The duplicate listing was supposed to have been resolved a year or more ago but wasn’t closed/removed fully as I could still see it when doing a search on dnb.com.  What you can’t see when doing a search on dnb.com is what industry\category they think you are in.  You may not even know they track this if you never saw one of their reports.  I only realized it because I looked at a sample on their website.

I think dnb.com is usually good on having accurate data which can be a problem in that it will be trusted even if it’s wrong and you wouldn’t expect them to be wrong so you wouldn’t be looking for a mistake there.  I’ve never understood how the duplicate listing with the wrong industry got created.  Maybe some day I’ll find out but it might just remain a mystery.