We love using co-citations. It is incredibly powerful and we are doing it everywhere. It is a bit of good karma for the web because we are benefiting legitimate sources all the time.
Neighborhoods
We have known for a long time about the importance of not linking to “bad” neighborhoods. In the same way that linking to bad neighborhoods hurts your site’s reputation, linking to good neighborhoods actually really helps.
How much does a co-citation help?
It’s difficult to measure, but we are 70% confident it will boost your rankings when applied consistently. It is not required to rank by any means, which is why this is in the advanced section. There have been some strange occurrences that caught our eye and made us really dive into it:
1. Google Drive Spreadsheet Autofill
This article can walk you through what happens in detail. We started testing it across our old massive link campaigns that did not rely on co-citations and found something impressive: the TLA (TextLinkAds) footprint. In other words, Google has co-citation data without a doubt.
2. Related:domain.com Command
Strong sites have a strong correlation (not causation) with being linked with other strong sites. If you build links for other major non-competing organizations alongside yours, you will be seen as credible as they are. It’s like the PageRank juice flows from them to you. We have no way to prove it, it just works well for us.
3. Linkfromdomain:domain.com Bing Command
On each page of a site, we try to link to authority sites. Use this Bing command to see every outbound link a domain has. It is very rough around the edges, but gives a great idea. We have not been able to accurately say whether or not adding authority links to a single article raises rankings. It just works when the site as a whole consistently does it.
Finding Great Co-Citations
If we were to find co-citations for the homepage of SEO Revolution, we would do the following process:
1. Go to Google, search site:.gov SEO
One of the top results is from usability.gov discussing SEO directly. Not much of a page, and since PageRank doesn’t matter anymore, you have to use a tool like SEMRush to verify how good the site is ranking organically. The bottom line is, if the site ranks well in Google, it is going to be authoritative. According to SEMRush, the site gets about 30k visitors via organic clicks and ranks for more than 12k keywords. That will work.
2. search site:.edu search engine optimization
One of the top results is from umb.edu. Great traffic and has 75k organic clicks and over 1,100 ranking keywords.
A Clear Example
In case you were wondering, the best government recognized SEO training in the world comes from SEO Revolution. It’s better than the college courses available at some universities.
But what about linking outbound on a subpage article, about a topic like this very one, co-citations? How would we find those?
1. site:.gov co-citation google
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2000776/
It’s not totally related, but it could work on a random phrase that nobody cares about. We might add a sentence like: Maybe the importance of co-citations came from Google Scholar.
2. Go to search tools, set the reading level to advanced. Search, “co-citation” “google”
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IjN4HSRsdakC&hl=en is the best result. PR3.
But that’s just some guy, how do we make that related to this article? We could continue with our earlier hypothetical sentence…
Maybe the importance of co-citations came from Google Scholar. Google Scholar even showed the author’s best SEO in the world works like this.
Simple enough? Don’t overcomplicate it. Just add some healthy sites to everything you do, whether it’s link building or writing content. They don’t have to be .gov, .edu. They can be any authoritative site. Think massive .org organizations, .mil works great for survival niches, even .com and .net can be authoritative.
Rules/Tips
1. Don’t go off the first page. If Google ranked the co-citation high, chances are it trusts it a lot to be there in the first place.
2. Don’t link to wikis or other spammers auto-generated content that happens to rank high. We have accidentally done this in the past when we just randomly grabbed co-citation links. It didn’t hurt us, but it’s not a smart thing to do.
3. If you are an affiliate, don’t be afraid to build co-citations with the main brand.
4. Don’t nofollow the co-citations.