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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)

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.

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.com

Or 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?

1. you need to add a rel=canonical to the of your index page. a quick google search will get you the right syntax.

2. Seems pretty heavily optimized, but i wouldn't worry about it much more at this point. focus on link building.

3. doesn't matter as far as i am aware.

I have a competator that has literally hundreds of sites like this:

http://www.wire-shelf.com/tag/cleaning/

that don't have a huge amount of page authority, but he is getting citations out of all of them.  The site is obviously useless, and just a place for some SEO company to keep adding more links to their various clients, and creating google citations for them at the same time.

Once you have filled out your information on every single local database and obtained all the legit citations you can, your competitors are still beating you by having more citations, from various sites like the one above.

Is there any way to stay whitehat and actually succeed? or should i just follow suit, and make 100 crappy websites full of crap and put links in them.  seems silly, but it seems like the only way to compete these days.

Thank you.  I have been reading the David Mihn stuff it is a great resource!

I'm aware that local search is mostly based on citations, and how well your Google places page is optimized, and the landing pages are optimized.  But I was wondering if anyone could tell me if backlinks have any relevance in the local search results?  And if they do, how much would you say the impact the local search results? could you estimate a % of total value?

Also if they do, does it help to have backlinks that point at your places page urls? or should the backlinks just point at your places page landing pages?

We currently have a domain that has a small amount of inbound links:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.1800wecoach.com/a!links

We decided to switch over to a different domain name, which currently has 0 inbound links.

What we were wondering is which would be better:

1. link to the new domain from the old domain in a prominent location on all pages.

or

2. forward the old domain to the new domain?

does forwarding a domain pass linkjuice?

how heavily do the list of keywords in google's webmaster tools reflect your ranking for those keywords?  For example see this screenshot:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39497/Screen shot 2011-06-04 at 7.22.31 PM.png

we are a self storage company, and our first two keywords in google's webmaster tools are storage and self.  the problem is nobody searches for self storage (from my keyword research). most people search for "storage +cityname" like "storage toronto" for example.

so i guess my question would be this:

would it be effective to change all the instances of "Self" on our website to "Toronto" or other city names to try to push the city names higher in google's webmaster tools keywords rank?

Thanks Miriam,

I have been trying to get a definitive answer on that question for several months now, which is probably why i came off a little bit aggressive towards Tyler.  For that i appologize.

Back on topic though:

I have already gotten our business information listed in 95% of the recomended sites on whitespark and getlisted.  But i find that google still only lists our business as having 4 or 5 citations, most of them are not from any of those recognized sites, but from other random extraneous places.

My idea was not so much about pushing google to recognize other websites citations, but to make it pick up citations on the big directories where we are already cited but not yet credited in google places.

I know most people say it takes time, but we are about 5 months in from submitting our info to all those directories and still nothing has showed up on our google places account.  So i was looking for ways to encourage google to pick up those citations that are already out there.

Nope, not what i was asking. i was asking about citations, about google local. the sites i am linking out to don't necessarily link back to me, often they just have a business citation about my page.

Or does google treat this behavior the same way as a reciprocal link and discount any credibility of the citation?

Thanks, but that's an American only site.

Edit: i was wrong, there is a canadian version! thanks!

Title says it all.

If you don't know what a citation is (from previous question you answered) then why are you answering this one? you obviously don't know what you are talking about!

Either you've never had to deal with local search optimization, or you are just answering questions with fake answers for the moz points.

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

Or will those sources be discounted by google then similar to how google discounts link exchanges?

I have noticed some pages, like mapquest, don't really have a directory, so google might not be aware of their content unless it is linked too???

In this type of a case, would it help to link to mapquest's search results? then the citation will get picked up by google?

Example: http://www.mapquest.com/?hk=6-i30tP49i