Is anyone using "Citation Vault"?

[Conor Treacy]

I came across Citation Vault this week when doing some backlink reviews of competitors for a local client. One of the things that the completion seemed to have in common were links from sites associated with Citation Vault.

Has anyone ever used their service?

 

[whitespark]

I have never heard of them, but just checked them out.

It looks like they created 300 of their own directories, and you pay $97/month to get a business listed on all of them in one blast. All 300 of their low quality, never heard of them, garbage directories.

I'd like to see these sites, but they don't list them.

IMO the value here is very questionable, but I couldn't say for sure unless it was tested.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Hi Darren,

I actually found them through a backlink discovery audit I was running on a client's competitor, and from there found a bunch of their listings.

I'm not sure if I should expose their directories here, but I'll send you a PM with some of the domains.

Many of them have DR 20+ (Ahrefs scores), some with DR 30+ and one I found with DR 71.

I know DR is not a ranking factor, and while DR may be high, the UR is low. That 71, shows UR 12, with no backlinks etc.

It's almost set up like a PBN but it's a PDN (private directory network)

 

[Jessica Lorenzen]

Hey Conor,

I know this subject is over a year old, but I just came across Citation Vault in a backlink audit too. From first glance, it seems pretty low-value, but I'm curious if you found any more out from your audit. I'm trying to decide what action to take on this front.

 

[Conor Treacy]

it seems pretty low-value, but I'm curious if you found any more out from your audit. I'm trying to decide what action to take on this front.

Yeah, we pretty much treated it as a non-issue and ignored the links. We did take a test site and purchased the service against it but the links added no boost to rankings that we could find. We let it sit for several months with no real impact.

When we run into those links now, we just ignore them. Not adding value, not hurting (from what we have seen), so we just move on to the next link in the audit.

 

[Jessica Lorenzen]

Thank you! I appreciate you sharing your insights. That was hunch as well but was curious if you'd uncovered anything further.

Thanks again.