Does position in local directories effect google detecting citations?
-
There are a lot of local directories that i have seen google pull citations from. Quite often i see people putting listings in these directories prefixed by several "A"s, so that they will appear on the first page of the list.
Just how deep does google crawl through the pages of these lists? will google actually crawl through all the pages?
Some of these directories offer paid listings that appear at the top of the directory. We have been considering purchasing some of these paid positions, so that google would be more likely to pickup our citations.
In one case i have noticed a directory: shopincities.com do something that spiked my interest. Basically, if you start clicking through the different pages of a category, the site will block you after 3 or 4 pages in. It serves you an error saying that you are not human. In my mind this is to prevent google from fully crawling their whole list, so that the people who pay for the top positions are picked up, and the people who don't pay, even though their profiles are listed there, never get crawled by google.
So would you pay for position on these directories? here are some examples:
http://www.shopincities.com
http://www.411.ca
http://www.goldbook.com
http://www.n49.ca
http://torontodirect.com
http://www.yellowpages.comOr would you just throw a whole bunch of A's infront of your business name so you appear on the first page of listings?
Or do you belive it doesn't matter how deep you are in the listings, and with enough time google will find it regardless and credit it as a citation?
-
Thx for sharing your perspective. I need to look into this more. We are just launching our new local campaign.
-
Thx for sharing your perspective. I need to look into this more. We are just launching our new local campaign.
-
Will do.
-
Gareth, Let me know if you see the same things we do?
-
That's really interesting to hear that the PA and rankings are pretty much in line (off I go to review my sites...)
There has been a drop off on Google showing citations, but they still seem to be showing images placed on local directories, in some instances taking the same image from a local directory over one added to a places listing in the live places listing.
-
you are correct, i probably asked too many questions in one thread. i think i will open a new question about my last point. about not all citations are equal in value.
-
This was a very informative and interesting post. I guess i will move away from my focus of citations for a while and back to strong backlinks to build up our PA & DA.
Thank you for clarifying the matter for me.
-
Probably been about 6 months now. and yes, they are coming up in googles index. (well some of them, not the one i described above where the site throttles google's indexing process)
-
We do a lot of Local seo, and have found that Google is just not showing the citations this year that they did last. We also have researched enough of the citations to see that they are not showing up as links either. Our thought is Google has stopped indexing many of these pages.
Last year we could count on 8-10 local citations on Places using the normal mix. Since February of this year, only ONE of those directory listings has shown up as a citation or link.
We now use completely different strategies on citations. We work on getting on local blogs, as well as other small business sites in the city. The other clear trend we see, is if you want to have a well ranked site in Places the direct causation (after having a places account of course) is PA of the sites home page. We looked at ten local categories and the rankings on Google (Places and first page). Simple, in the VAST majority of cases the rankings fall right in line with PA ranking.
The days of Local rankings being a significantly different system than organic SEO seem to be gone.
-
Its a valid question, and something I've noticed myself. There's a couple of things I'd suggest considering.
Firstly, how long ago were the listings in the local directories submitted and accepted? If it's been less than a month it may well be that Google hasn't associated the citation/ link yet to your places listing.
Secondly, have you carried out a search in Google to see if they have indeed indexed the page the link is on, or run a
"link: " type search to see if Google acknowledges the link. -
I think you might need the help of a professional SEO company since you have so many specific questions and theories.
Currently, you are cherry picking a few odd examples, when I believe your time could be better spent making sure you have registered at places that are relevant to your business, onsite SEO, offsite, SEO, linkbuilding, content building, following David Mihms guide...while this will take away from your investigation, it will put you a position to improve your SERP.
Dwelling on a competitor can be a huge waste of time and effort since you can only control what you do. I very much doubt the paid positions are helping him at all.
-
Here's another example:
http://www.yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/Storage-Self+Service/Toronto+ON/in this case the people paying for the priority positions on that page are right at the top of the page, rather than buried 5 pages into the results. in fact they are right at the top of each page of the results, so over and over again they are above the free listings.
I have heard that google considers the value of a link based on its position on the page. So wouldn't it be safe to assume that google also considers the value of a citation based on its position on the page?
-
We are already listed in all the powerful free directories, and have been there for over 6 months. the information about our locations is consistent across all of these sites (i have tipple checked it). yet we still do not see very many citations appearing in the "more about this place" section of the places page.
I have noticed that our competitors that are getting citations from the same free directories that we are not getting our citations from. We are listed in these directories under their free section but our competitors are paying for premium positioning in these directories. Which makes me think that google isn't scraping the entire directory, to get all the way down to our name (which starts with an 'S').
take a look at this page:
http://www.shopintoronto.com/Home/Moving---Storage/
we are listed a few pages in. now try clicking the pages: 2, then 3, then 4, then 5... and you'll get this:
"We're sorry but your web browser has been blocked from our site because we have detected the presence of spyware on your computer.
We recommend you install a spyware remover to fix this problem.
Please click on one of the following recommended links to download and install a spyware removing program. "which leads me to believe they throttle to prevent google from fully indexing their site, thus only paying customers get the citation, and free customers don't really get anything, other than their time wasted....I've only noticed this in one place so far, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if other websites are using similar techniques to prevent google-bot from indexing anything more than the first page of each category. -
You've asked quite a few questions in one post, but I will do my best to answer a few.
If you are focusing on local SEO, get into as many local directories as you can, and make sure you Name, Address, and Phone number are IDENTICAL in each directory as it is found in Google Places, Bing Local, and Local Yahoo.
When you are listing in the free directories that Google seems to appreciate, e.g. Yelp, Kudzu, Hotfrog, Merchant Circle the search engines will more than likely find them on their own. However, if you are worried about them being crawled/indexed or not seen in a reasonable time frame you could always post the links to your profile to Twitter or Facebook, or in your blog which will also show up in your RSS feed.
While you shouldn't over do it, this can potentially help the process of being found.
Attempt to get into the powerful free directories before you start spending money on the paid, IMO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Confusion About Local SEO
Hi, I hope someone might be able to help me out with this. I am somewhat confused. Basically I have a site that has 2 operating bases in 2 neighboring counties. Say Hampshire and West Sussex. Now I understand the need for schema markup. However, where exactly to put this markup I cant see a definitive answer. even on the official googleblog they seem to shy away from answering this. For the moment I have placed it on the contact us page and obviously there are 2 sets of schema markups for the 2 addresses. Now, the bit I am confused about is that I was reading the Koozai Local SEO white paper and they mention to have the addresses in the footer. This is fine and I can do that, especially as there are a lot of sub pages on the site for different products which we would like to try and rank for. Now, this is the bit I am slightly confused on, should the addresses in the footer be the schema markups? I suspect not but I would like to be sure. Many Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | kirstyseo0 -
Schema for a local business with multiple locations
Hello I am trying to add schema to a website that has several locations. Is the best way to do this is by tagging the home page of the website as the business main location and then create a page for each location and then mark them up accordingly? Thank you for your help.
Image & Video Optimization | | edwardfrebow0 -
Local SEO: Specific pointers on how to improve my campaign
Hello, I changed my address midstream in my campaign, from spelling out "Suite H" to now it's #H. Wow, what a cleanup job. I'm in at least 3 dozen directories I've found, and it looks like there are more. I'm adding myself to all the main directories that yext lists here. I've also used whitespark for a couple of months. My site is here. The term I'm targeting is "Boise Weight Loss. I"m on page 3 and not in the local results. Could you guys give me some pointers on how to get up into the top 3 of the local results? I'm planning on cleaning up and adding directories. I don't know how many I'll need, and of course I am looking for pointers on the other factors (besides citations) as well. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Local SEO NAP issue
Hello, All of my citations addresses have the street address 913 S. Latah Street except there are other businesses in this building with the same address. Should I have included "Room H"? Also, is "S." different than "South"? Is "St." different than Street? Looking for correct consistent citations.
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Off-Page Local SEO for a Home-Based Businesses?
What are some ideas for optimizing for off-page local SEO when you're working with home-based businesses that don't necessarily want to share their physical address, and using a PO box is not an option for major local SEO directories?
Image & Video Optimization | | Inturact0 -
Does google places mind listing cities on the home page
Hello, A site in our industry is listing a bunch of cities on their home page and ranking for them. Like "Our dog training facility provides services to dogs in city1,city2,city3,city4,city5,city6 state" where the cities and states are relatively in their area. It's working organically, will this confuse google places? Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
How do I get my site to rank in Google Videos?
I have a site that has quite a few videos. When I do a search from Google video's using keywords for our site, the site is not listed with the video site although it is listed with the html site. So how do I get Google to recognize that the site has all the videos. eg google video search with keywords: social media "damon adachi" website: biztvcanada.com Thanks Janice
Image & Video Optimization | | jwdavis0 -
Google places: how to deal when competitors spam?
My competitors are spamming in google places, how do I report them? following are a few examples of how they are spamming: Some of them are not local businesses, they somehow managed to get a number and some random address. Some of them have keywords as company names, their exact company name doesn't have any keywords. Some of them have multiple places pages with keywords as company names. how does one deal with it?
Image & Video Optimization | | virtualhandshake0