Why are my citations not showing up?

[jtaylormoon]

We're managing a website for a client and decided to use Yext to build citations. We've gone through and manually verified that they are live. Moz Local cannot find this website or the citations, nor could Ahrefs, or Majestic.

Google has indexed 154 pages of the website, Bing has indexed 10. This dealer has two websites (I know that's a faux pas, it's by client request), so that they can "test" our website before giving up their old one. They're tied to the same NAP, but have different web addresses. We got permission to claim the listings for the website we sent live and put them up about two months ago.

I can't figure out for the life of me why none of my tools will verify the existence of this website and the citations. I checked for a no index and no follow command in the HTML (which shouldn't be a problem because Google has indexed the site) and it was clean. The only thing I can think of is that the old site is getting credit for the citations even though we've listed a different website address. Can anyone verify this?

[DT3600]

I have read a lot of the responses here. While some of it I agree with, I think we are overlooking some very basic ideas about search engines and what they do, how they work and how we get credit for backlinks that push up the domain authority of our websites.

So lets start at the beginning. It is a 'given in the SEO industry' that google citations (listings on multiple business listing sites) is important and that by signing up for YEXT we are attempting to solve a two-fold problem:

1. We are synchronizing the NAP issue  read more here ( name address phone number) for the purpose of resolving NAP consistency.
2. we are having our sites listed on Showmelocal, Manta, Foursquare, Yelp etc in a synchronized format with a clickable link to our URL. ( domain of our business)

The second one, we immediately assume that by signing up for YEXT  we will have our business domain listed there and google will give us credit for this backlink - WELL THIS WILL ONLY HAPPEN IF THAT PAGE THAT YOU ARE ON IS INDEXED BY GOOGLE. I.E. YOUR LISTING ON FOURSQUARE OR SHOWMELOCAL GETS INDEXED BY GOOGLE. AND THEN YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE GETS INDEXED BY GOOGLE A FEW DAYS LATER  -AND THEN GOOGLE GIVES YOUR CREDIT BECAUSE YOU HAVE A HIGH RANKING DOMAIN AUTHORITY DOFOLLOW BACKLINK POINTING TOWARDS YOUR BUSINESS URL.

This is not the case.  Some people have mentioned on here that google sees these links.  Google WILL NOT unless they get indexed. I agree with Chris Ashton that google does not see these links until a long time later - this is due to the amount of time it takes to index these sites and all these pages.  Only when those pages with your business URL are indexed and your business site is indexed will you get credit.

If you find this explanation to be inaccurate then test it.  You have to be testing it with a domain that you have signed up for YEXT and you cannot find its citation listings with its backlink when you perform an MOZ backlink search. Look at a business that is signed up for  YEXT and not showing google citations when you use MOZ or other software. Perform a search in the same format as it is displayed on foursquare without the https: ....eg. enter the domainname.com  just on its own into the google search bar....look through the pages ....if you cannot find it then the foursquare page is not indexed.  Or search the name of the business with "foursquare" along side it in the google search bar....

eg: Bergman dentistry Queens foursquare ( a fictitious practice)

**if you dont see it in the SERPS pages -and  it listed on foursquare-  then its not indexed - **

hence you have confirmation.

** try with other citations sites... **

My solution - take the link to the profile page on foursquare or any other site - paste it multiple times into indexkings.com or pingfarm.com ( many advise against this but how else do you index someone else's site that you have no control over and you cannot login into search console) - also copy those  multiple links and paste them into about 5-10 youtube video comment sections ( preferably your own) - when you tube indexes it it will crawl those links.  then create a separate page on you site title links. paste the 100 or so google citation profile pages in here, now index the  page manually using search console....when google crawls that page it will index those links.....

Failing this try to manually login into the profile pages - make some changes and update them - then do the method above.

comments are welcome, but the above has worked for me...

PH

PS - i made a correction  as a I had previously mentioned YELP instead of YEXT.  my mistake.

[Moz.HelpTeam]

Note: This is Miriam replying, but I'm in Mozzer Alliance at the moment.

All feedback here is really good! Thanks, everyone, for contributing so generously.

Joricia, regarding Moz Local, I'm very curious that we are not finding anything for the business. Are you able to share the details? If not, it's totally okay, but I'd like to be able to re-produce the results you are seeing.

As others have mentioned, it is definitely not a good idea to have 2 websites featuring the same or similar NAP. This can cause untold issues, unfortunately

I'll look forward to your reply!

[Eric_Rohrback]

While I agree it may take longer to see some of the citations that are created with Yext, I don't think the duplicate information from Yext's data push is necessarily bad. It's not like you're duplicating an article - these are local citations which are treated a little differently. Yext is good because it helps create consistency in the local search ecosystem (which is a positive local ranking factor), but i don't think Google dings it for duplicate content. Businesses create hundreds of citations with the same information, yet rank very well. I see that as Google acknowledging the importance of some parts of the data, but ignoring or not positively counting others. Local citations are not "low quality" in the sense they'll help you in local search. Local directories (Yelp, Yellowpages, insiderpages, local newspaper business directories, etc) are valuable in their own way, but only if your intention is to improve local search presence.

To check if the citations are indexed do a site:{citationURL} search. If they're indexed, then Google has found them and is most likely counting them.

The two websites could be working against you, especially if they have similar information on them. Which website do you have tied to the GMB page? Is it the same as all the citations like you mentioned above?

[fiberglass]

Here's the problem.  Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs, all do not crawl nearly as deep as Google does.  I promise you, Google sees these new citations, even though they don't register on your tools.

The citation created is a "low-quality" page, which is going to not only take longer for Ahrefs and even Google to find, but will also end up being far less impactful for positive search growth.

With Yext, you don't have the opportunity to create a unique/quality webpage... with Yext, you're essentially creating duplicate content, which we all know at this point Google does not appreciate.

Your citations are very likely already known to Google, even if you can't see them.  If you search for the NAP in Google and don't see it, it's likely there is not enough unique content on the page and that there is not enough link-flow to the page.

Try running an experiment where you use Yext to create a Yahoo listing, then create your own Yahoo listing manually with a unique description, add all relevant categories and see which one ranks higher and faster.

[ChrisAshton]

Basically it's to do with the way the tools you're using gather this data.

The short answer here is that none of these tools can possibly give you real-time data - there will be a delay of anywhere from days to months depending on a number of factors so a fresh link built today may not show up in Moz (Open Site Explorer), Majestic, Ahrefs etc until some time early next year. It's a similar story if a new domain isn't showing up in the tool at all - if no backlinks have been "found" yet, it has no data to show you.

Since Google doesn't provide any of these tools with access to the citations they've "seen", each of them have their own way of collecting this data and trying to emulate what Google does as best they can.

What this means is that these tools have to recrawl a site before they can detect any new/lost backlinks and list them for you. This obviously takes time and a lot of resources given how many websites are live at any one moment so it will be done using some kind of algorithm and/or schedule.

Because each tool has their own way of doing this, you may even see one tool show you a fresh citation faster than others. Unfortunately this is the best indication we have of a backlink profile. Frustrating since we'd all love to report to our clients/managers exactly how a link building campaign is progressing in real-time but it just means that part of our job is understanding roughly how these tools work and communicating realistic expectations around them.

I hope that helps!