Citations: Do they look spammy after a while?

[ColoradoChris]

Hello to all,

With trying to compete vs national companies in my area, I am looking to increase my citation ratio. My current domain authority is a bad 15, so I am trying to get it up.

I am looking at using whitespark I think its called, and I did a trial run and I am just curious if citations start to look more like bad backlinks after a while like a directory listing?

Or if the point with a citation is that you are adding your NAP so its no longer spammy looking?

For an example, my company website is a construction based website.

Some of the citation sites were like, "construction-contractors.net" This looks some what spammy to me, yet it had a 30 range domain authority, and so again I am trying to walk on egg shells to get decent links and mentions.

Any thoughts on citations are appreciated.

Have a great day

Chris

 

[Chris McCreery]

Well Whitespark is definitely the service to use for citations.

I like your thought process though, I feel like citations will eventually just be abused and Google will start discounting them or low quality ones at least, if they haven't already.

I think you need to focus on higher quality citations over quantity. Find out where the competition is and make sure you're there too. Then start looking for citations specific to your vertical that might have better domain authority than most. After that some hyperlocal citations specific to the service area you are targeting.

There is a great guide here ($30) from Nyagoslav (who is now with Whitespark)
Citation Building Guide | Local Search Marketing by NGS

Another one here from Phil Rozek
Local Citation Building Best-Practices | Whitespark

I'm sure someone else will chime in as well.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Chris, excellent resources!

Hey Chris from Colo,

I don't specialize in citations, so am not going go answer, but I've often wondered the same thing.

I moved your post to the citations forum because Darren from Whitespark is one of our Top Contributors and watches this section of the forum, so he's more likely to see your post here. Plus Nyag, the other leading mind in the citation world is a member here and now works for Darren, so hopefully one or both will comment.

 

[Blake Denman]

I like your thought process though, I feel like citations will eventually just be abused and Google will start discounting them or low quality ones at least, if they haven't already.

I couldn't agree with you more on this. Think of citations as what links were 5 years ago in the Google algo. Back then it was all about quantity and keyword rich anchor text. Now it's unwise to build links like that.

On my company's blog I have received a few "comments" that are nothing more than spammy citations. Keyword rich author name with the citation inside of it.

Eventually Google will have some type of algo that looks at this, it's only a matter of time.

Another great resource for citations is here: Citation Building Strategies - The Complete List For Local Businesses

Hope that helps and good luck!

 

[ColoradoChris]

Thank you Linda. Being new I was unaware of the specific forum. You really have a great place here.

 

[whitespark]

Hi Chris,

Someone recently asked ?how many citations do you need??, and here?s how I?d answer that:


1) InfoGroup, Localeze, Acxiom, Factual
2) Yelp, Yellowpages, Superpages, CityGrid, Dunn & Bradstreet, Local.com, Foursquare, Yahoo
3) About 50 more of the high quality generic citation opportunities in the US.
4) A few good industry-specific citations
5) A few good city-specific citations, if available (think local chambers and business associations)
6) Unstructured citations. See this list for inspiration: Citation Building Strategies - The Complete List For Local Businesses


You?re done. Don?t keep building more and more citations. They?re not going to move the needle, and yeah, they start to get spammy.

Hope this helps!

 

[Chris McCreery]

Sweet! Thanks Daren!

 

[chadkimball]

Don?t keep building more and more citations. They?re not going to move the needle

ever tried this?

 

[whitespark]

I've set up rank tracking for clients that have a complete citation profile, then order 150 citations from us. They didn't see any ranking improvements after a few months of tracking.


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[chadkimball]

I've set up rank tracking for clients that have a complete citation profile, then order 150 citations from us. They didn't see any ranking improvements after a few months of tracking.


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oh I was thinking more of multiple hundreds of citations

 

[whitespark]

I would expect ranking to go down if you do that. There aren't multiple hundreds of decent citation opportunities. Just complete garbage. If you'd like to test, and can make sure no other work than the citation building is done, I'd be more than happy to set up rank tracking for it.


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[whitespark]

I should clarify that it's not because of the citations that I think you'd see rankings drop. I don't think citations can make that happen. I think rankings could be hurt because of the multiple hundreds of links from low quality directories.


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[chadkimball]

I would expect ranking to go down if you do that. There aren't multiple hundreds of decent citation opportunities. Just complete garbage.

There are some decent opportunities to be had, for instance, getting awesome press that gets posted in multiple authority news sites (like a viral news story about the company). Or Forum threads reviewing your business, and discussing it, etc...

Last I tested, there weren't any google ranking drops for too much NAP, no matter where the NAP was. Has that changed? I'd expect, at worst, for poor quality citations to be ignored. Let me know if you've seen different...

---------- Post Merged at 03:30 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 03:29 PM ----------

oops! I just cross posted with you, I saw your correction, that you've not seen low quality citations cause ranking drops.

 

[Chris McCreery]

What about NAP citations for funeral homes? Usually the obituaries get syndicated many times.


Chris McCreery

 

[chadkimball]

What about NAP citations for funeral homes? Usually the obituaries get syndicated many times.


Chris McCreery

great idea! there are a ton of creative ways to get citations like this

 

[whitespark]

Yeah, if thousands of citations could hurt you, then popular businesses like Katz Deli in NYC wouldn't be able to rank. Thousands of citations with links from low quality directories: bad. Thousands of citations from around the web because you run a great business or had some kind of newsworthy event: awesome.


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[chadkimball]

Thousands of citations with links from low quality directories: bad. Thousands of citations from around the web because you run a great business or had some kind of newsworthy event: awesome.

LOL:
How about thousands of citations from low quality sites with NO backlink included in the citation?

 

[whitespark]

I don't think those would hurt you, but I doubt they'd help either.

 

[chadkimball]

I don't think those would hurt you, but I doubt they'd help either.

I'd be interested knowing for sure.

Don't ask me how I know, but I know for sure that 5000 of these types of citations ranked a plus local page in the 7 pack in 30 days. Over 1 mill exact match competing in organic.

Problem with that test was, the listing also had one or two hundred quality vertical directory type citations as well, so it wasn't really a pure test. Could have been the quality citations that actually made it rank.

Anyone want to volunteer a plus local page for a test? It would need to have zero citations from the beginning, and then we can see what happens.