Any way to speed up Google's discovery of citations?

[HoosierBuff]

I had a client who had a yext account, and he transposed his address when he input into yext. I fixed it, but, three weeks later, the old address is still showing up in the serps because google hasn't re-spidered those pages yet.

I'm not at all surprised, these local citation sites are huge, but. . . are their any tricks to getting these spidered quickly? I thought about putting a page listing these listings on his site. . . but, was looking for something better.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Many of these citation sites and directories are huge so sometimes I think it helps if you feed her the links in a breadcrumb trail so she'll spider the changes or the new page.

Could put a link on an old blog post they did. Save it.

Then use chrome and search for the title of that blog post so you can click through to it via the SERPs. Then once at the blog post click the link to the citation page.

And if that page was already indexed, it's just changed. Then I'd search for citation site + business name, so you can click through to that page from the SERPs and hopefully she'll pick up the changes then.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Thanks Linda,

Great ideas. Interesting how so much of your advice was based on click data. . . . it's an easy thing to do. Do you think it has a big impact?

 

[Linda Buquet]

I never really thought about it as click data. Moreso just thinking in terms of the fact that spiders follow links. And also Chrome phones home, is the other part of the equation.

It's not a silver bullet and I have no proof it works other than I've done it for years and when I give her a bread crumb trail she seems to follow it and index a little faster.

Many years ago. I regged a domain and that same day started building the site. Just threw some stuff on the home page and was playing with layouts. Certainly didn't want to be indexed yet. No links and again just regged that day.

Next day I was searching for my keywords to check the competition and there was my new site with the ugly unfinished home page ranking already.

Back then I was using the Google Toolbar and it phones home just like chrome does. I kept tweaking in Dream Weaver, then hitting the site with the toolbar and hitting refresh to see how it looked. That's the only way I can think of that Google knew about the site.

Since then I've always done it on important pages. Especially after I optimized a client's site. Often really small local sites only get indexed every couple weeks or so. I'd hit the site a couple times a couple different ways after I optimized and often would get reindexed and a ranking bump in 3 - 4 days instead of having to wait 2 weeks for her to get around to finding the changes on her own. I just gave her a helping hand to find the new content.