If you’re in local SEO, you’re likely very familiar with local citations and business directory listings, among other local SEO solutions.
In case you’re not up-to-speed, citations are basically directory listings that include the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of local businesses. Some primary examples of citations are: Yellow Pages, Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc.
Citations are the foundation for climbing up rankings in the Map Pack (now known as the 3-Pack or Snack Pack). The more times that Google can match your Google My Business NAP with directory citations, the more you’ll see yourself climbing up the map rankings.
But what does this have to do with affiliate SEO? Most SEOs don’t try to rank their affiliate websites locally or in Google Maps. No one searches for “garcinia cambogia chicago” nor do they look for the closest location they can “get rid of acne before prom.”
Although you might have no incentive for ranking your affiliate site locally, here are 6 compelling reasons why you should consider adding citations to your backlink blueprint.
6 Reasons to Send Citations to Your Affiliate Money Site
1. Pillow Anchors
Most SEOs prefer to send their target anchors using high-quality PBNs, while sending their pillow anchors from cheaper low-power sources, such as press releases, web 2.0s, blog comments, and now… citations.
Citations will typically get you either a URL anchor or an image link. Both are great for anchor diversity.
2. Link Source Diversity
Many people argue that in order for a link profile to look natural, links should come from a variety of different sources, such as PBNs, Web 2.0’s, forums, comments, etc. I don’t completely agree, but it definitely doesn’t hurt to diversify your link sources, as long as you’re diversifying with links that real websites and real businesses use (more on this in a later article).
Business directory citations are a great example of a common link source that a real business would use. Blog comments, forum profiles… not so much. However, citations are 100% natural links utilized by real businesses every day.
3. Branding and Trust
One of the main problems that affiliate SEOs face is establishing trust with Google. To deal with this, we typically do everything we can to disguise the affiliate aspect of our sites (such as cloaking affiliate links).
By creating citations for a money site, we attempt to show that this website has a physical office location and is thus a real business. This is just one extra trust-generating step that can set you apart from your competitors.
4. Establishing Local Relevance
If your goal is to rank in a specific country, then you’re probably making efforts to establish local relevance by getting a country-specific TLD and telling Webmaster Tools that your website targets that country.
Take it a step further and get citations from that country to further establish that your website is relevant in that locale.
I’m ranking in Australia, India, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Each and every time I’ve sent country-specific citations to a website, it’s gone up in rankings.
*Update*
Here’s a great case study of me sending citations to a Spanish site in order to establish local relevance.
This affiliate site in the weight loss niche ranks in Chile, Peru, and Mexico. On April 21 I sent Chilean citations to the site. Watch the rankings in google.cl start to pull in the lead, despite being the most competitive country for the search.
5. Link Velocity
So what’s the solution? Add more links. But it’s not that simple. Send too many links without the social signals and traffic to justify it, and you’ll find yourself slapped back to page 10.
There are a few link types that can get away with high link velocity and citations are one of them. Google knows that real businesses will go out and create their own directory listings and most likely in batches. Therefore, it’s no problem if you go out and create 15-20 citations in a single day.
This additional worry-free increase in link velocity is one of the major bonuses for using citations.
6. Price
Last but not least, one of the best things about citations is that they’re cheap. You can go out and spend an afternoon making them yourself for free, or simply outsource them for less than $20.
How to Create Citations for Affiliate Websites
Here’s the step-by-step process on how I create these citations.
1) Create a Fake Business Address
Find the address of a commercial business office in the city you’d like to setup your fake business at.
Choose a Suite number that isn’t already registered with Google My Business.
For this example, I’ll use:
2515 Camino Del Rio S Suite 311
San Diego, CA 92108
2) Add Your Address to Your Website and Social Profiles
First, add your fake address and a fake phone number to the Contact Page of your money site.
Next, you’ll be adding Schema markup code to the footer.php of your website. The markup will include this same exact fake address and phone number. For more details on this, download my free Onsite SEO Guide from the sidebar of my blog.
Lastly, go to each of your Social Fortress properties and add the address where applicable. This includes your Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.
Bonus Points: For added trust, you can take the steps of getting Google My Business (GMB) verified. I’ve done this a few times for affiliate sites and haven’t noticed much difference, but if you’re a completionist like I am, go for it.
3) Order Citations from PBN Butler
As mentioned before, you can create citations yourself for free, or simply use PBN Butler’s Citation service. I always go with the 15-citation (non-boosted) package (use coupon “DIGGITY10” for 10% off). Turnaround time is roughly 2-3 days for delivery.
Be sure to use the exact address and phone number from Step 1.
4) Index the Citations
The only thing frustrating about this whole endeavor is that citations are a royal pain-in-the-ass to index. You’ve got to hit them with the kitchen sink.
Here are the steps that I take to get them indexed.
- Instant Link Indexer
- Video Sitemap Trick
- Ping the video-sitemap.xml with Pingomatic
Results
Now comes the fun part: Wait for the results.
Here are results from three live, money-generating affiliate sites.
Case 1: Medium Competition – Health Niche – Foreign SEO – 38% Improvement
Case 2: Low Competition – Beauty Niche – US SEO – 29% Improvement
Case 3: High Competition – Health Niche – US SEO – 0% Improvement
Result Summary
2 out of 3 of these testcases experienced significant gains while one of them (the high competition, high search volume testcase) was pretty flat. While we don’t have enough data to conclude what was the cause of not seeing gains in testcase #3, we can certainly say that it didn’t hurt. And for $20, it’s definitely worth trying.
I’m interested in hearing more about your results with this tactic. Give it a shot, come back and please share your results below.
Nice read yet again with some very actionable advice. Will be adding citations to a few of my affiliate sites and wait and see what happens.
Great info Matt! I think building citations is indeed only going to help. I’ve never tried it myself to be honest but I’m definitely going to try this now on one of my more challenging affiliate sites!
Great case study Matt. I have been wondering about this very thing recently as my client-seo friends have been talking a lot about citations but I didn’t know anyone who was doing it for affiliate sites. The thing that put me off was trying to get the fake address verified, but if that is only required for Google then it’s not such an issue.
Great case study Matt, will try it out.
One Question: For a citation for an affiliate site, would you use a money page inner URL or a homepage URL?
Thanks
Homepage.
Thanks.
If not geo-targeting the domain in GWT (ie targeting worldwide) will adding USA address and citations have an overall positive effect?
Chances of a positive result are good… And it definitely won’t hurt.
Great Matt thanks I’ll try it.
What about an ecommerce site targeting both uk and Ireland, add citations and info+markup for both? Will that help?
I’d pick your main focus location and send citations from there and there alone.
Great read! I will try using local citations for my affiliate sites too and see what the results will be.
This is great! Exactly what I was looking for. Two questions though…
1. The false address thing seems a little shady to me. Is there any risk in this? What I mean is, is there any risk of the false address being discovered and some penalty being imposed?
2. If by website targets the US and the UK and I add citations for the US, will be UK ranking suffer?
Thanks!
1) Not nearly as risky as anything else we’re doing in blackhat SEO.
2) Probably won’t help or hurt.
Thanks for the great testing results. Will be implementing this.
Dale.
Nice reading Thank you. Can you tell me more about adding Schema markup code to the footer.php?
Please check the Onsite SEO Guide found in the sidebar.
Good info Matt, something to add to my arsenal.
Nice finding Matt,
You keep bombing us with these great bits of wisdom that I keep coming back for more…
I’ve got several affiliate sites that I created a brand page for, but it turns out you can’t add a maps listing to them or attribute them to a location, you can only do so if you created the page as a local business page.
Would you recommend deleting the brand pages and then re-create them as local business pages? Would it even worth all the hassle if I’m not going to verify the maps listing? Last time when I created a local page without verifying it, it didn’t even get indexed.
I’ve only used local businesses, so this is uncharted territory for me.
My site has an imprint. If I add citations, I would have to add fakedata because I would not want to make a business at my home on gmaps.
Hi Matt, very interesting read, I had never thought of using citations to add link diversity and URL links. You mention above using your video sitemap trick to get the citations indexed. I’m not sure I understand how this would work for the citations we would create. Could you explain please?
Cheers,
Chris
Hi Chris,
1) Use the plugin to create a video sitemap.
2) Edit the sitemap to include the URLs for your citations.
3) Ping.
Hey Matt,
I am still confused about using Video sitemap index trick for citations. Lets say that PBN Butler created a citation at Yelp and now how will I index that through the video sitemap index.
As far as video sitemap index goes, I can do the youtube video trick as you’ve detailed out for a blog but confused about citation sites.
Thanks in advance
Mani
Edit the sitemap and put in the offsite URLs. The rest of the process is the same.
Hi Matt. Great idea. I did the video sitemap trick and pinged it at ping-o-matic. The citations were indexed within a half hour.
Question: should I have the XML video sitemap re-build and return to normal on my site after that?
Yep
How about using subdomains to target different geographic areas?
Never messed with it.
I’ll test and report back Matt. Thanks.
Hi Matt,
Do you suggest only circa 15 citations per affiliate site?
On a slightly separate topic but sticking with citations, how many would you normally do for a local client or ‘rank & rent’ site? – I’m UK based btw
Cheers
Andy
For affiliate, 15 citations does the trick for me. You don’t want to do too many since, you still want your link profile to be similar to the rest of the niche. For local, look at the top 5 rankers and do 20% more than the average.
Great advice Matt, many thanks!
Andy
Matt, I just wanted to double check this:
.
Do you use the 15 citations package only once on your affiliate sites? (to the homepage)… Or do you use them each time for a different inner page?
.
Say for example my site “domain.com” has 3 product reviews:
.
domain.com/product01
domain.com/product02
domain.com/product03
.
Should I use the 15-citation package only ONCE (to the homepage)? Or I can use it on each different money page (making a total of x3 times, one per page)?
.
Excellent article as usual! Thank you!
I just use it once for the homepage. Don’t overdo it.
Could you please be a bit more clear about step 1? I added a fake address to Google map maker but it got denied with the reason that the business is not registered in the Chamber of Commerce (The Netherlands). Am I missing something?
You dont need to actually go out and register with Google unless you want to. The basis of this all is to find an address that is not already listed so you can add it to your site (schema) and build citations for it.
So you need to have the address listed on the site as well?
I put it in the schema, about page, and contact page.
Hi Matt,
Interesting case study. I have a question for you. Suppose I create a fake business address in Google places. How would I verify the address? I am from India and here Google sends a letter to the physical address with a pin to verify the listing. Is the process same in the U.S?
Find someone that lives in the area and offer them some money to help you out.
Hi Matt, this might be a stupid question but aren’t their any legal issues involved in doing this?
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m guessing no.
Matt, it just occurred to me… What if my affiliate site is in Spanish, and I get profitable traffic from both Mexico and Spain.
Which country should I use for my citations in that case? Mexico or Spain?
Also… Creating citations from just ONE of these countries (say Spain), isn’t going to mess up my rankings with the OTHER country? (say Mexico)
P.S. Wonderful One-In-A-Lifetime webinar 2 days ago! 😀 I’m watching the replay right now (and probably will do it again at least x5 more times next month until the info gets buried into my subconscious mind). Thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge with us, the SEO mortals 😛 haha. Jokes aside, you’re changing lives pal (I know you have changed mine). Thank you, man.
Pick the country that has the higher search volume.
Thanks for the kind words, brother.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the awesome information that you are providing in this blog. This is way better than the paid content that i have here in my country.
I have two questions regarding citations and the Trust Pulling method.
For example: I have a Local SEO site that i´m ranking in the first page for a lot of terms in different locations like:
http://www.plumbingdomain.com/city-A
http://www.plumbingdomain.com/city-B
http://www.plumbingdomain.com/city-C
And i´m renting then for different business owners.
How would you approach the Citations and Trust Pulling?
A: Create 1 social fortress for the root domain and send some PBN links to it and create some Citations to the root domain also?
or
B: Create social fortress for invidual pages like http://www.plumbingdomain.com/city-A and send Citations to the same individual pages?
Thanks again for the great work!
Also thanks for the great webinar that you made for Lion Zion
Big fan!
Thanks for your nice words. Glad to have helped you as much as I have.
About your question… go with option A. It’s what normal businesses do, and will perform better.
But you can also setup individal schema for each city page, and send citations to inner pages as well.
Hey Matt was wondering if you could help me locate the ‘text file’ in wordpress, to index my citations I have 1 video embed on my home page currently but unable to find any tags etc or around this. I have followed all 5 steps but struggling at this point. Thanks
“The sitemap-video.xml file that is created by the plugin is a text file. Copy one of the entries that it created for one of your posts and create a new entry. An entry starts with and ends with . Between the and tags, you’ll edit the URL there and input the path of the URL”
You need to embed a video on a post. Not a page. Then find your sitemap-video.xml file through the cpanel file manager.
Ok thanks a lot matt for the reply will follow those steps
Hey,
If we add a fake address and fake phone number, doesn’t google have to verify this information?
I thought they made a phone call or sent a post code to confirm your address before listing you on the
local maps listings? How do we get past this?
This has nothing to do with getting Google My Business verified. That’s a whole separate story.
You said in point #2 that you could also try to get GMB verified, I was wondering how to do this with a fake a address & numbers for an affiliate site as you also said in #2 that you have done it a couple of times. I was just wondering how to do this with a fake address & phone for an affiliate site.
Find someone who lives in the city you want to verify in that can help you out with post office forwarding.
Hey Matt, how do you value each indexed citation with a link back to your site when running your anchor text ratios?
For example: If I get all 15 citations indexed, and they all have url backlinks (follow or nofollow), would you count that as 15 addition url backlinks?
Yup!
Hey m8
Can you send different location citations to different pages with the same affect?
For example If I had 1 page for fat loss group new york, then another page for fat loss group chicago
Can you send NYC citations to 1 page and then chicago citations to the other page to help rank each page in each term..
would this work or look weird
Absolutely.
Fantastic as usual… Please keep adding such valuable Posts.
One question to Link Velocity:
If you added links to quickly and you have been Shot out of Top100 -> will Social Signals afterwards help or what would you Do then?
Thank you
Honestly, never been penalized for link velocity, so I wouldn’t know.
Interesting read Matt.
One question though.
While setting up my Amazon associates account, I’ve stated that I am not in the US and none of the business operations are carried out in the US.
Will it have any negative impact if I put a U.S. address on contact page of my niche site?
Thanks
I am definitely not qualified to give professional advice on Amazon ToS. Sorry.
Hey Matt,
Great article! I was wondering if you would just simply add the ‘Suite 3’ to the business centre’s main address, even if ‘Suite 3’ doesn’t really exist?
Cheers!
Yup!
Awesome man, thanks!
Great article Matt! I have a 4 page money site all targeting different keywords and looking to diversify each page with citations. Would you use the same unregistered address for all 4 pages to build citations or would you only send citations to the homepage?
I only send citations to the homepage.
Noted. What would you suggest I use to diversify the other inner pages. (already done web 2.0s)
I pillow with PBNs and sometimes press releases on inner pages.
Noted with thanks Matt!
Great info as always Matt! I would like to ask you for one advice on a similar topic. Let’s say I create a website for the keyword “home security systems Chicago” which will be a review website (so not acting as a real company doing home security systems). Do you think I can also rank my website in 3pack? Or it’s quite dangerous and can be got down pretty quickly?
Sure, its possible.
Hi Matt, first of all I want to thank you for creating such a great blog. You gave a wealth of information when at times I’ve felt that I am stuck on what to do.
I just have a question about brand/diversity links… Some of the top ones in my niche sets up a pbn just to put their naked url/brand name at the homepage and nothing else. I am not sure the power of a brand name on a pbn since they hide their links. (I was only able to find the pbn through google search)
Do you think this is necessary and I should copy what their doing? Or would citations, inner page pbn, and weak links really suffice for branded links.
Thanks!
Anchors are anchors regardless of where they’re coming from (debatable on low quality links like comments).
Thank you Matt!! Seriously, I had ordered citations after reading this post although they haven’t even been delivered yet. It just can’t be too much of a coincidence that I have somehow experience an improvement over my rankings after trying to follow your advice of on-site seo, anchor text distribution, using synonyms.. etc.
Btw, does this mean you don’t really believe that a niche relevant link would have “more power”?
What do you think of profile links or non-contextual links?
Niche relevant links definitely have more power.
“What do you think of profile links or non-contextual links?”
Weaker.
Hi Matt,
I tried to verify my GMB but the only option is by sending a verification code to the address. The problem is that it’s a fake address. I was able to create the account but not verifying it.. is this enough?
Thanks!
Enough for this exercise, but not for getting in the map.
Matt, thanks a bunch. How to deal with citations if you have one site ranking in some countries? Place fake local address for each country in every language ? Does it all natural to G! eyes?
We’re not trying to get into the map pack. We’re just trying to get links from foreign TLDs.
I really like the idea here i actually never thought that we could citations for affiliate iste only for local. i dont generally do e comm or affiliate but im starting to and this methods does seem logical to use so thanks for your input
Hey Matt,
Thanks for this awesome piece.
I ordered citations and followed your 5 steps to index them but got the following error for all the citations in the sitemap-video.xml I submitted to Google Webmaster:
“URL not allowed. This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location.”
Is this something you have experienced before and can direct me to how to resolve?
Thanks again.
Sorry. Never seen this before.
Thanks Matt for sharing. BTW I’ve used the address you used as a sample but just changes the Suite 309…. so I guess we are neighbors now haha.
Welcome neighbor!
Hey Matt,
It would be an issue for an affiliate website , to have citations with different adresses? The vendor from where I bought messed up my order …
I would love to see your thoughts on this ..
Cheers!
I’d clean them up, but that’s because I’m psycho about getting everything right.
Hey Matt,
has anything changed in terms of how you get these bad boys indexed?
(having a declining success rate using ILI + Video sitemap + Pingomatic, but maybe it’s just on my end)
I’ll have to check with Jay.