Is it worth paying an indexing service to get unindexed citations, indexed?

[CaribouFondue]

So i've got 100s of citations that are not indexed by google. Often it seems our citations don't get indexed because our name is near the end of the alphabet, and our category is near the end of the category list, and it seems google stops scraping these directory sites before reaching our citations. I have tested this theory by making fake listings on the same websites, with business names that start sooner in the alphabet, or by placing businesses in categories that start earlier in the alphabet and these citations always end up getting indexed.

So, do you guys think there would be any value in paying for some sort of indexing service that will get these citations indexed?

I have a secondary question. How much does google care about the category of the citation being correct? Because one fix for the indexing problem is to just put my business in the wrong category intentionally so it appears higher up on the directory. I have seen some of my competition doing this to get their citations indexed. For example, in the industry: Self Storage. I have seen competition listing their business under "Automobile" (its a stretch, but technically we do store cars, as well as peoples personal belongings). Since A comes a lot sooner than S in the alphabet, the Automobile category gets indexed while the Self Storage category doesn't. But does google see this as a vote for the wrong category? If we had 100s of Automobile citations does google start to think our business category on GMB is wrong?

 

[whitespark]

Hey there. I think the indexing question is interesting. I have not found a good service that does this, but would be very curious to test. If I were you, I would give it a try if it's not too expensive and I would track rankings before/after to see if it had any impact. I'd give it at least a couple months to see.

The way I've tried to improve citation indexation, and have seen others do, is to create a page on your site for "Where can you find us online?" and then link to all the citation URLs. Add this page to your sitemap, and also submit it for indexing through Search Console.

Regarding the category switch, that seems like a very bad idea to me. I think it's very likely that Google considers the category and other relevancy signals on the pages it finds your business on and associates that with your business entity in their knowledge graph. So, if your business is on dozens of pages that are sending strong "auto repair" signals, then you're sending Google the wrong message and it's likely to hurt you more than help you.

 

[premiumweb]

I definitely would not put the wrong category. Darren's suggestion of creating a page and adding that to the sitemap is a great one.

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[chadkimball]

We have used OmegaIndexer with some success, although it seems to be working less than it used to. Very cheap to test it out though. Testing out Links Indexing Service – Social Pracharak as we speak. It looks promising as long as the citation page in question isn't spammy or a non USA TLD.

Another thing you can do is MAX OUT the description field of every single citation. The more unique text you can get in there the better. We've had success with using spintax to generate a unique description for each, google is more likely to index the citation page that way because it at least has some unique content on it.

 

[CaribouFondue]

spintax

High quality suggestion I like it a lot.

Darren's suggestion of creating a page and adding that to the sitemap is a great one

create a page on your site for "Where can you find us online?"

I remain strongly unconvinced that this is a good idea, it is essentially a reciprocal link. It seems better to have a side blog for blasting out things like this. I took a look at what the indexing services out there do, and this is essentially it. They have an active blog that is frequently updated, and they drop piles of links into posts like "Recent important links from facebook/twitter/etc".

The problem with indexing services is that they then turn around and delete these posts afterwards, which I think might mean the citation would eventually drop back out of google's index. What is also interesting is of the indexing services i looked at, the blogs they use for this have very little authority, often zero backlinks. So that part doesn't matter. You could literally just make a new blog, on a new domain, and dump a new article into it every month for 6 months to get google bot actively scraping it, and then start dumping in your citations there. Probably best to keep this separate from your main entities, like a new hosting account, and a different domain registrar account, with domain privacy on.

So, if your business is on dozens of pages that are sending strong "auto repair" signals, then you're sending Google the wrong message and it's likely to hurt you more than help you.

This I agree with.

 

[dgrunited]

So i've got 100s of citations that are not indexed by google. Often it seems our citations don't get indexed because our name is near the end of the alphabet, and our category is near the end of the category list, and it seems google stops scraping these directory sites before reaching our citations. I have tested this theory by making fake listings on the same websites, with business names that start sooner in the alphabet, or by placing businesses in categories that start earlier in the alphabet and these citations always end up getting indexed.

So, do you guys think there would be any value in paying for some sort of indexing service that will get these citations indexed?

I have a secondary question. How much does google care about the category of the citation being correct? Because one fix for the indexing problem is to just put my business in the wrong category intentionally so it appears higher up on the directory. I have seen some of my competition doing this to get their citations indexed. For example, in the industry: Self Storage. I have seen competition listing their business under "Automobile" (its a stretch, but technically we do store cars, as well as peoples personal belongings). Since A comes a lot sooner than S in the alphabet, the Automobile category gets indexed while the Self Storage category doesn't. But does google see this as a vote for the wrong category? If we had 100s of Automobile citations does google start to think our business category on GMB is wrong?

Backlink Indexing Services

Get Google to index your backlinks fast using our services so that you can be ranked higher on the search engines quickly.

www.transfield.com.my

 

[chadkimball]

Backlink Indexing Services

Get Google to index your backlinks fast using our services so that you can be ranked higher on the search engines quickly.

www.transfield.com.my

have you actually tested this service? there are many services like this but not many of them work.

 

[premiumweb]

Just got an email from RankMath saying they've integrated with a service called IndexNow. Might be worth looking into. It's included with their plugin now.

How to Use IndexNow With Rank Math » Rank Math

In this detailed tutorial, we'll walk you through how to use IndexNow protocol with Rank Math to submit your site's content automatically to search engines

rankmath.com

With Gratitude!
Glennette

 

[cfazio]

IndexNow is unfortunately for getting pages on your own website indexed.

I have tried the "find us on the web" page, with manual "high quality" citations and absolutely no progress. I did ~40 citations with unique 500 word+ descriptions (or max allowed for lower character count limits), tons of images with filename and alt text seo best practices, and filling out every field that made sense - no progress.

Omega Indexer was the only thing that got a few citations indexed.

About to get into more testing with a large sample size, with rank tracking before and after citation indexing efforts.

Yext citations are sitting at 0% - 5% indexation rates.

 

[chadkimball]

@cfazio did you try LinksIndexing ? we're testing it right now, seems to work better than omega. still doing more testing to me sure

 

[cfazio]

@cfazio did you try LinksIndexing ? we're testing it right now, seems to work better than omega. still doing more testing to me sure

Have not... testing process has not begun yet a little slow rolling. We are going to use Local Falcon and try to isolate variables changing to citations being indexed alone... doing scheduled grid scans for control properties and ones we are doing indexing efforts for (to see if it even effects rankings).

Notice it is like 5x more expensive than Omega, but if it works that cost could equal out. I will add it to our upcoming testing though.

 

[chadkimball]

Linksindexing.com is working great in our tests. Going to put more orders in. Make sure to specify if you need a NONINDEXED page indexed, or an INDEXED page re-indexed, he uses a different process for each.

 

[JordanJCaron]

Linksindexing.com is working great in our tests. Going to put more orders in. Make sure to specify if you need a NONINDEXED page indexed, or an INDEXED page re-indexed, he uses a different process for each.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've created my account and am trying to deposit money but the page is blank. Guessing you never had this issue!

 

[cfazio]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've created my account and am trying to deposit money but the page is blank. Guessing you never had this issue!

Ouch, I got this email last week with this link.

Apparently, the guy is super stressed / in debt and is not continuing Links Indexing. But he gives away all his indexing secrets.

My Last Post Over BHW - My Golden Link Indexing Method - Confession - The End

 

[chadkimball]

omegaindexer is currently working to get his whole method encoded into their system so soon you'll be able to get his awesome results through omega

 

[keyserholiday]

Citations and NAP are deader than a doornail. You only need the main citations that you can get from Whitespark, Brightlocal, and Yext. All the others are completely worthless and won't move the needle at all. The citation eco-system has completely changed over the years. You can move the needle more with other better tactics.

 

[chadkimball]

There are more reasons to get them indexed than for NAP, and a big one is simply for backlinks. They provide a broad range of domains that are linking to your main domain, they are one more signal to help show google that your site is an important brand. They are very simple, easy links to get.

 

[keyserholiday]

There are more reasons to get them indexed than for NAP, and a big one is simply for backlinks. They provide a broad range of domains that are linking to your main domain, they are one more signal to help show google that your site is an important brand. They are very simple, easy links to get.

If Google isn't indexing them, why would the links count by using an indexing service? Google has gotten a lot better since Penguin has first launched 10 years ago next month at discounting certain links. There would be better uses of time and money to get links elsewhere that would have a huge impact on rankings than trying to fool Google with unindexed citations.

 

[dgrunited]

There are more reasons to get them indexed than for NAP, and a big one is simply for backlinks. They provide a broad range of domains that are linking to your main domain, they are one more signal to help show google that your site is an important brand. They are very simple, easy links to get.

You've got a valid point here. I agree with you.

 

[cfazio]

If Google isn't indexing them, why would the links count by using an indexing service? Google has gotten a lot better since Penguin has first launched 10 years ago next month at discounting certain links. There would be better uses of time and money to get links elsewhere that would have a huge impact on rankings than trying to fool Google with unindexed citations.

As you mentioned in the previous comment - "main citations" is what I am trying to get indexed. The sites provided by Yext are having trouble getting indexed. Alot of trouble.

Maybe they just don't have value anymore? We will see.