Google Local Citations - Quality Issues to Be Aware Of

[Linda Buquet]

Darren from WhiteSpark brings up some really good points in the article below.

We know about how linking to 'bad neighborhoods' can negatively impact organic ranking. If I ever did citations (which I don't) I would only submit to what I thought were good citation sources anyway,
BUT just never thought about some of the citation quality issues Darren brings up.

How to Identify Quality Citation Sources

Here at Whitespark we look at thousands of citation sites for our citation building service. Just as with links, not all citation sources are created equal, so it's super important that you are careful with where you submit. Some citations are going to help your rankings, and other citations could hurt your rankings.

To determine the quality of a citation source, we consider the following for every site we submit to...

Read the rest and let us know if you have any questions.

Darren is an active member here and I can get him to stop by if you have Qs.

 

[Russ]

I just stick with the major authority directories and if there are any highly relevant sites to my clients niche I'll consider putting citations there. This way I avoid all the time researching. Just my two cents.

 

[Phil Rozek]

I just stick with the major authority directories and if there are any highly relevant sites to my clients niche I'll consider putting citations there. This way I avoid all the time researching. Just my two cents.

Yeah, it definitely wouldn't be time-effective to do citations research for every client, but I'm guessing Darren's point was just that one should research citations some time. Of course, once you've determined a given citation source is a keeper, you can submit a bunch of clients to that site and not have to research it again. I think it's one-time research. Although it's a PIA, it's probably more efficient in the long-term than spending time and/or money to build citations that end up not being very helpful for clients.

 

[apolodor]

This issue is particularly interesting and delicate, when you think of potential competitors who might think of sabotaging your local optimization by lowering your citation quality + messing up with your NAP. Sooner or later, Google will probably have to come up with some sort of "Citation disavow tool".

 

[Nyagoslav]

I just stick with the major authority directories and if there are any highly relevant sites to my clients niche I'll consider putting citations there. This way I avoid all the time researching. Just my two cents.

I agree with this, but it is not a possible approach in some cases. For instance, most of the SMBs don't really know which are the major directories (except probably the usual suspects Yelp, Yellowpages, Citysearch, which are definitely not enough). They could do some research and find lists of such directories, but this is only in the case they do business in the US. Try finding a list of the best directories for France, for instance, or for Spain, or for some Scandinavian country, or pretty much anywhere in the non-English speaking world (and probably Germany, where there are a number of high quality local SEO specialists). In this regards I posted just recently an article, similar to Darren's, whose focus was to teach "researchers" how to determine the best citation sources for any niche:

Determining the Best Local Citation Sources for Any Market | Local Search Marketing Blog by NGS

It was actually sparkled exactly from the lack of the knowledge that is assumed in your answer for a lot of the major markets (and in this specific case - France).