Co-citation is something that is considered by many SEO gurus and practitioners when it comes to encouraging that your site has the best neighbors possible. It’s not always easy to affect, but in some cases, taking a proactive approach to co-citation is well worth it.
What Is Co-Citation And How Does It Work?
When a given website (Site A) links to your website (Site B), and also to several other websites (Site C, Site D, and so on), there is a link or tie between your site and the other sites linked to from Site A. It sounds complicated, but scale this example up many times over, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what sites are related via co-citation.
Just because your site isn’t directly linked to or from Site C or Site D, because one or more other sites are linking to all of you, search engines are seeing you as related or similar to some degree. Ideally, the more relevant and better quality these sites that you share co-citation with are to your keywords and overall site niche, the better you’ll be in the search engines.
How To Benefit From Co-Citation
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to really to change, control, or manipulate co-citation in most cases. In other words, when someone decides to link to your site, you have very little control over that matter — hopefully the site that’s linking to you will have positive effects rather than negative when it comes to co-citation.
However, there is one instance where you can check ahead of time to make sure everything is A-Okay. Before asking another site to link to you, it’s a good idea to check the potential co-citation effects that could potentially result ahead of time. And doing a little bit of background research is simple.
One easy way to grab a quick picture of how your website’s co-citation picture looks is to use Google’s "related" search refiner or "Similar" sites feature. Here’s how…
To do a "related" search:
Just type this in a Google search box (where "example.com" is replaced by the URL of your website or the particular website you are wanting to know more about): related:www.example.com
To view "similar" websites:
Simply do a Google search for your own site or any other site that you’d like to know more about. In the search results, look for the option under the chosen result that says "Similar" and click it — that’s all there is to it!
By following one of these two options with Google search, you’ll be able to get a pretty good picture of what co-citation looks like and what kinds of websites are being tied to yours (and visa-versa). So even though you can’t always control it in all circumstances, you can take a proactive approach to co-citation in other cases.
Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.
