Why is indexing citations important and how can I get Google to do it faster?

What does ‘indexing’ mean?

Google indexes websites and web pages to audit them, return relevant results to search users, and, basically, make it easy for us to find what we're looking for.

Imagine a book index, which lists all the different chapters so we can go straight to the specific section of the book that we’re interested in.

Why is it important to get citations indexed?

When Google indexes a web page, it becomes aware of that page and the content on it. Businesses need Google to be aware of their citations so that they can have an impact on SEO and help to boost local rankings.

Ultimately, if Google isn’t aware of citations, then they won’t have an impact on ranking.

How can I get citations indexed faster?

Our citation-building experts use a few tactics that help create citations that are indexed faster by Google. Here are some that we recommend:

1. Create a page on your website and add links to all your citations on this page, then submit this page to the ‘Fetch as Google’ service within Google Search Console to prompt them to crawl that page.

2. Create a post on Reddit or Quora that contains a list of your citations. Google regularly crawls these two sites, so they'll find and follow the links to your citations.

3. Submit each of your citation listing URLs to a third-party pinging service (e.g., Pingomatic or PingBomb). This is quick easy, and there is no charge involved.

4. Submit your citation links to a link-indexing service such as Indexification.