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Why I Am Watching Co-Citation?

I just asked all the time what are you watching, what’s new and exciting, what trends to you see happening? This week I will be writing three blog posts about what I’m watching and why. Today’s post is about why I am watching co-citation.

Google has made really sweeping changes to how it rates websites and what used to work for years to garner organic placement is not considered spammy by Google and may even run into a placement smackdown filter. This is why I am very carefully and intensely watching co-citation.Here are a few articles about co-citation that you may want to read:

SEOMoz take on co-citation

Jim Boykin’s take on co-citation

In lay terms, co-citation is close to link bait and article marketing but with natural growth. Both authors state that Google and Bing as so smart now that they do not have to be fed keyword phrases, they will decide on their own based on the content that links to you. But, here’s the change it is not the link text that they are weighing, but rather the jist of the content where the link to your website is embedded. In fact, the page that links to you may not even link to your service and may not even contain keywords on which you want to place. Instead it is an “authority” factor.

So here’s what I understand so far…

Google and Bing spider the web, they read incidents of mentions of your name and content, they spider your own website and get a picture of the services you provide, then they review how what people say about you and the authority of the site that links to your site talks about you. They then use this in their algorithm to place you in importance to being an authority on a specific topic. Way Cool!

Although I don’t think that anyone in my industry really knows yet what works for organic placement in this new world on Google and Bing, but it is clear that content, the sharing of your content will be a very strong impact for organic placement.

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Matt Cutts Talks About Negative SEO

You’ll want to watch this YouTube video featuring Matt Cutts from Google talking about how Google feels about your competitors trying to sabotage your Google.com organic placement by setting up spammy sites to link to your website in a effort to push you down in the results if they can’t supersede you. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I&feature=em-uploademail)

Typically small to moderate sized businesses will never run into problems such as this. However for very competitive industries, you may actually run into this problem. Google has created the disavow tool to assist in re-mediating these types of problems.

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More on the Disavow Link Tool from Google

So you’ve used the Disavow Link Tool to re-mediate your website placement and remove spammy links that have nailed you in the SERPs, so how long do you have to wait to see improvement?

In this interesting article two heavy weights from my industry weigh in with Matt Cutts from Google stating:

“It can definitely take some time, and potentially months. There’s a time delay for data to be baked into the index. Then there can also be the time delay after that for data to be refreshed in various algorithms.”

You’ll want to read the full article and exchange between Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts on this topic at SiteProNews.

The bottom-line is that anything to do with organic placement takes time. Give yourself six months easily to be doing everything right after you have corrected problems to see even a glimmer of results. But be careful about when you first see your site pop up in the results.

I have found once you start to move your site will typically fall in the results after the initial ranking. I like to test placement again four to six weeks out after the site has popped up to see where it will really fall in the index. Sometimes I will see a temporary high placement and then a drop to a regularly maintained level. Use the second ranking to evaluate if you have more work to do at that point.

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New AdWords Features for 2013

You’ll want to watch this 30 minute of so video from Google AdWords that reveals what is in store for AdWords advertisers for 2013. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNyqfC0JXVE&feature=em-uploademail)

Here is a quick overview of what’s coming:

1. Product Listing Ads for mobile, Dynamic Contextual Ads for the Display Network, and even Dynamic Remarketing.

2. New Search Extensions are coming: customer support interfaces in the search engine results, email submission to add your name to a subscription list without leaving the Google.com search results page, enhanced call metrics, and social extensions.

3. This one is pretty big – remarketing is coming to the search results! Currently only available in the Display network, remarketing or “stalker ads” are coming to Google.com. This will be my most anticipated new addition for 2013.

Make sure to watch the full video so you can see where AdWords is headed for 2013 yourself.