Information alongside NAPs

[James]

Hi - while Im on a roll and my local listing is moving up a little I wanted to keep my momentum and plan to keep working on it. Somthing I wanted to check with the experts here is this.

I used a citation building service some time ago and the guy did seem to make me a lot of good quality citations on a selection of sites, however, I have one critisism which he assured me would not be a problem..... now I am not so sure.

When he made the citations, where there was the oppertunity to add a bit of content along site it, he used the same block of content form my site on all of them. His argument for doing this was that these were not traditional backlinks and wouldnt help much wish SEO so having the same content was fine.

Knowing more today I would challenge the above for a few reasons:

1) Having longer unique content on each citation would likley increase the chances of the citation page sticking in the google index

2) Unique content would allow me to get more related semantic words on the page that link back to my main site. For example I would be able to write one citation focusing more on the laser tattoo removal, one could be more about aftercare etc

Does anyone have any input on this they could share with me? The 2 questions I really have given the above background are:

Will having the same content on all the citations hurt?

If it would not hurt would having unique content on them all give added benefit?

I have the logins for all citations so I could still change them if its worth doing but I dont want to change them for no reason

 

[Nikos]

Hi there,

My advice on citation building is indeed to include unique descriptions.

As Google filters duplicate listings it is harder for directories to rank higher on SERPS.

By altering business descriptions you increase chances of faster indexation and higher rankings.

Please note that it is harder to achieve fast indexation now that Google has removed the public Submit URL tool.

¬Nikos.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I would say that going back and editing descriptions for existing citations is likely a big waste of time. However, if you have a new client that doesn't have the major ones in their industry yet, it's *possible* that using a unique description could be a good idea. I haven't tested this yet but will be in the next couple months. We have a client that moved so we have to update his core citations. While we're in there, we're going to also update the description slightly and see if it results in more of the citations being indexed.

The follow up question that I'm also not certain about is how much does more citations indexed impact ranking? My thought is that the answer is not much but I'll let you know when we finish our test.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Hi - while Im on a roll and my local listing is moving up a little I wanted to keep my momentum and plan to keep working on it. Somthing I wanted to check with the experts here is this.

I used a citation building service some time ago and the guy did seem to make me a lot of good quality citations on a selection of sites, however, I have one critisism which he assured me would not be a problem..... now I am not so sure.

When he made the citations, where there was the oppertunity to add a bit of content along site it, he used the same block of content form my site on all of them. His argument for doing this was that these were not traditional backlinks and wouldnt help much wish SEO so having the same content was fine.

Knowing more today I would challenge the above for a few reasons:

1) Having longer unique content on each citation would likley increase the chances of the citation page sticking in the google index

2) Unique content would allow me to get more related semantic words on the page that link back to my main site. For example I would be able to write one citation focusing more on the laser tattoo removal, one could be more about aftercare etc

Does anyone have any input on this they could share with me? The 2 questions I really have given the above background are:

Will having the same content on all the citations hurt?

If it would not hurt would having unique content on them all give added benefit?

I have the logins for all citations so I could still change them if its worth doing but I dont want to change them for no reason

Using the same content is standard citation practice.

To answer your questions though:

1) Yes, I think it is likely that it increases the stick rate of indexing. Any improvement in content quality should do that. However, does a citation that's not indexed have less value than a citation that is indexed? I'm guessing it does but it could be negligible.

2) Yes, that is certainly possible.

However, we did do this for a client on his niche related directories and didn't necessarily see any correlation to ranking improvement. But that would be very hard to prove or disprove honestly. Very anecdotal.

Did you offer to write the descriptions yourself and pay them for the extra time it took to upload them?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Mike Blumenthal wrote about this a few years ago.

To Quote Him:
"If there is a benefit, it would be quite small. Although there is no exact understanding of how Google uses directory descriptions, it would seem to be a minor or non-issue. I have seen no indication that strong directory entries like Yellow Pages, Superpages or Yelp are not shown in search results due to a duplicate description."

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Mike Blumenthal wrote about this a few years ago.

To Quote Him:
"If there is a benefit, it would be quite small. Although there is no exact understanding of how Google uses directory descriptions, it would seem to be a minor or non-issue. I have seen no indication that strong directory entries like Yellow Pages, Superpages or Yelp are not shown in search results due to a duplicate description."

Yeah, YP, Superpages and Yelp don't suffer from this. It's because Google can easily crawl their pages because they're set up in a crawlable hierarchy. I also think Google just values them more for the overall unique content that they have and probably other factors.

This would be more for the lower tier directories that have poor architecture that Google also doesn't see as valuable as a Yelp, YP, or Superpages.