Page for all your citations and other pages your page is listed at?

[JimFranco]

Would it be acceptable or bad practice to have a page with all your citations and sites you are listed on some where on your website to assure they are crawled and indexed ? Or is this bad practice with to many outgoing backlinks ?

 

[mborgelt]

Hey Jim,

This is a little heavy-handed if indexing is your goal. I would submit your live citation URLs to Search Console to get them indexed.

Curious to see what methods others are using, though.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Michael!

 

[Martin Briggs]

This was one of the hacks suggested by Darren Shaw in his article.

I thought it was a great idea and have been considering adopting this approach. I'd also be interested to hear what others have to say!

I see how it could be considered slightly spammy but it's just one page and the links are to (mostly) reputable sites. You could even argue that they have genuine value in corroborating company info while some will even carry reviews.

I'm thinking I would only link to the most important citation sites and not dump 1,000 URLs on the page. 30-50 max.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Unfortunately, the URL submission doesn't work anymore. It stopped working around 2 months ago. It will take the URL but won't index it.

Now, does that mean Google does nothing with the URL you submit? Not necessarily.

Having a listing in the index was never the goal. Having the listing show up on Google's radar was/is the goal. However, having a listing indexed meant that Google knew about for you listing 100% for sure.

Now? There's no way to tell if Google knows about your listing or not. They could take the listing and give you a ranking bump still but just not put it in their index.

It's hard to tell at this moment.

 

[JimFranco]

so would putting them on a page for Google to crawl worth it ?

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I agree with the sentiment above about it possibly being heavy handed.

But I might try it with a small sample size and see if it works.

Note: not all of your listings will get indexed. Anything 75% or higher is a win. Heck, with the way things are now, 40% would be a win honestly.

 

[JimFranco]

do you think if it works. I should delete the links and then try another sample size on the same page ?

 

[JoshuaMackens]

do you think if it works. I should delete the links and then try another sample size on the same page ?

I think that should be fine.

But if it does work, I might try a new page with the rest. Google may index a new page faster than the new content of an old page. Although it doesn't make sense for them to do that, sometimes Google doesn't make sense.