Last night I caught a tweet from Greg Flewelling about a new tool being launched today called the Local Citation Finder.  This tool is a collaboration among Darren Shaw of Whitespark and both Garrett French and Ben Wills of Ontolo Link Building Services.  They say it’s based on the Phone Number Co-Citation Analysis for Local Link Builders.  It’s a well written method for identifying citation sources. 

So I followed the link on Greg’s tweet, and signed up to be notified when it officially launched.  I spent the rest of the night rocking out some new Adwords campaigns for a non-local client that runs a fantasy football contest.  I was about to call it a night when an email from Darren came in.  It gave me pre launch access to test the new tool out.   I tested out a phrase where position A was held by a keyword in title/fake geocentric address spammer.  5 minutes later I received the report via email. 

The report included the top seven listings, then a list of unique domains (243) ranked in number of instances found, and then gave a list of all the URLs it found (387).  Awesome!  A plethora of potential citation sources put together in less than 5 minutes from the time I requested them.  I literally could have spent hours mining this data myself manually. 

I found the top ranking spam listing did not fall into line with the results presented in the above mentioned analysis, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a useful tool.  The spam listing recently appeared, and I doubt it will stay there.  All it proves is that a geo-centric address and query matching titles still carry weight, EVEN THOUGH THEY SHOULDN’T!

I’m really happy this tool was created. It will definitely raise the bar in the world of Google Places optimization technique.  Considering it will be used as a competitive intelligence tool, it will now be easier for people to see what you are doing and how you are getting citations.  This means that anyone in this business that is worth a damn, will be thinking about and implementing ways to get citations that are difficult to duplicate… in case they are not doing so already .

I tip my hat to Darren, Garrett, and Ben.  Well done, gentlemen!

Filed under: Local Search

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