When there is inconsistent data in the country and state fields, you might see doubling up of data in the country and state fields, limited choices when chaining city, state and country fields or repeating regions in SEO location pages. This article shows you how to address the problem.
Background
MetaLocator understands that a state lies within a country, and a city lies within a state. When the system builds drop-down lists of state values, it considers them them by country because there are duplicate region names around the world.
Example
In the below example, you might find Alabama listed twice in state drop-down since it is found once under United States in row 1 and again under US in row 5. This represents inconsistent treatment of the country field and can cause duplication in state and country drop-downs.
How to fix the problem
Provide consistent and complete data in the city, state, country and TLD fields. The use of abbreviations should be consistently applied and a value for country could be consistently provided in each case. For example, if you provide two-letter state/province abbreviations in some places, do so throughout all your data.
A corrected example is shown below:
To make these edits, you can export your data, make the changes directly in Excel, and then import your data. To learn more about that process, follow the links above.