Beginners question about co-location/citation

[carl_daedricdigital]

Hi, could any fellow users lend me their experience please, I feel I may have confused myself!!

Cut a long story short, one of the seo techniques I (like many here) employ is guest authority for sites. This is done through a manual process on quality sites. However, many sites are panicking now about Google and are nofollowing the author link back to my site. While the guest blogging wasn't done exclusively for links, a backlink is always nice.

This got me onto the topic of co citation. From what I understand, it is essentially google rewarding you but without giving you back link credit. This is no the area where I have confused myself...am i right in thinking that if my brand is talked about in content on a quality site about Internet Security, then google can see the mention of my brand and will still award me some benefit from. To gain said benefit from the content is it enough that my brand is mentioned, for example 'Brand X published a paper about keeping kids safe online in 2013' or would the brand x thing need to be an active link to my site (no follow).

Does this make sense? I did warn that i have managed to confuse myself hehe

Many thanks for firstly talking the time to work out what on earth I have written and for any feedback offered.

[danatanseo]

Hi Carl,

I don't blame you for being confused. Since none of us knows what Google is actually rewarding as an "authoritative mention," whether that be a followed link, no followed link or a brand name mention, my answer can only be based on conjecture and experience. Hopefully there are some fellow Moz folk out there with some data to support what I am about to say.

I think that if we can track brand mentions, so can Google. Consequently, while it might not be the case right now, very soon it may not matter at all if a brand mention has a link or not. As for sites that are adding the "nofollow" attribute to your citation links...I'd probably be thankful that they care enough about the integrity of their content and their sites to take the time and discipline required to do this. In a way, they are protecting you too.

While Google has brought down the hammer on guest blogging, I think they are smart enough to know that inviting a high-authority and knowledgeable expert to write a post for their blog is and has been very normal practice in journalism since journalism began. While they would most likely never come out and say it (because doing so would divulge too much info about their algorithm), but I firmly believe that a "nofollow" link from certain sites are more valuable than a followed link from others. Along those same lines, I think a brand mention without a link from certain places, my be much stronger than a followed link from other sites. While I'm sure it's a complex equation, Google is certainly capable of writing an algorithm that could take all of these factors into consideration and assign a value to that brand mention or link, regardless of whether it is linked, followed or nofollowed.

That being said, when we produce content, sure, if I see a brand mention that isn't linked, I most likely will contact the editor of the publication and ask if they would consider adding one. I think the key for us is, we don't produce content purely for the purpose of getting links. We produce content based on our company expertise and actual work/projects we've completed. Sometimes it's something we write and sometimes it's someone else writing about what a great job we did. As long as it's quality and relevant to our audience, I don't really worry about the other stuff, to be quite honest.

I am very interested to know what others have to say on the subject.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Carl,

Dana has a brilliant answer here, but I'll add a couple more things:

Links are still a heavy part of the ranking algorithm, but it's absolutely clear that Google wants to move away from this reliance, simply because link building has been scaled so effectively by so many people that it is not a true measure of impartial authority anymore. I'm sure they would love to rely on social signals as this is people talking about what they like, don't like and do in a candid fashion, but Google doesn't have the ability to infiltrate the most valuable social network for this (Facebook) yet, and they probably never will.

As such, they still need to rely on what is posted on the rest of the web, and citations / "mentions" seems a good place to start. It has long been true that they seem to look at "links" that are not link but simply cited URLs (e.g. if I write out http://www.site.com/, this CMS doesn't link to it but Google crawls this page and sees the URL). This is plainly obvious if you are checking a site's 404 errors through Webmaster Tools - I have seen a lot of "404s" that aren't links: Google reports a broken link in WMT and shows you where the link is placed on the third party site; you visit that site and see that it is not a link, but simply a URL written out like the example here.

Does PageRank pass "through" that "link"? Impossible to tell exactly how Google deals with those from an authority point of view, but they see it. And they would clearly be wrong to ignore data like this, so we can expect that such citations are at least factored into how a site appears to Google.

It's also likely that they take into account mentions of a brand name in a similar way, and links that are nofollowed. It's impossible to say how, but I would certainly like to guess that 100 mentions from authoritative sources (including many newspapers that do not link out, as a rule) are more likely to increase a site's authority than 100 links from questionable or lower-quality sources.

[carl_daedricdigital]

Dana, Jane,

Thanks for the useful replies, I guess the main to take from this is to be natural. Get some citations with links, get some without links. When guest posting, where it's now done, is now being accredited to the Google Plus author account, with a mention of the brand 'written by Jeff (G Author link) from x.com (maybe a link, maybe not. If a link, nofollwed). I think the G+ mark will help too with giving credit to the end site for the author's work.

I can see the day when all backlinks will be no followed and brand mentions are what causes a site to rank high or low. Although, that takes us into a potentially dangerous area...if google are using mentions of your brand over the web to decide that you are a popular site and should rank higher, what if Google can judge the tone of the mentions. If a brand has lots of mentions on forums and article saying they are a scam (for example) would Google then decide that they are not trustworthy and shouldn't be ranking...

[JaneCopland]

That's such an interesting point, because it happened a few years ago. Check this out: this story went up on Search Engine land in 2010 about a company that appeared to be seeking negative publicity because the brand mentions looked like they were helping the company rank - http://searchengineland.com/googles-gold-standard-results-take-hit-new-york-times-57081

Google didn't take kindly to that. http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

http://searchengineland.com/the-decor-my-eyes-fiasco-local-reviews-tactics-57725

http://searchengineland.com/no-you-cant-rank-well-just-by-cultivating-terrible-reviews-57333

The bloke involved ended up in prison.  http://searchengineland.com/decormyeyes-merchant-vitaly-borker-sentenced-to-four-years-in-federal-prison-132434

So yep, Google attempts to decide on intent in mentions as well, and I would guess that they have worked hard on that since the DecorMyEyes fiasco, which was a few years ago now. They definitely need to be careful that companies who are often talked about negatively don't benefit from it, although there are some examples of largely negative press companies doing quite well after those companies are also often linked to - Ryanair does crazy-well (even though they claim to only have just started doing SEO last year) with mostly negative press.

My former agency did a good study on the travel industry a couple of years ago - see the PDF here. This screenshot shows the companies in the UK flights industry who were performing best in June 2011. Ryanair was the best-ranked airline, outperforming "legit" airlines. I see you're in the UK so you don't need it explained to you why that's pretty crazy!

I can't get into Ayima's system to see how Ryanair perform today, but they're still page 1 for a few of the high value keywords I checked.

Suffice to say it's a difficult task for Google, but since they created and subsequently are trying to destroy the linking ecosystem, they need to work hard on it.