Welcome to day three in our study on linking. Today, we’re looking at Co-Citation. Now, not many people know about this, so I’m going to start off by using a definition from SourceForge:

Bibliographic Co-Citation is a popular similarity measure used to establish a subject similarity between two items. If A and B are both cited by C, they may be said to be related to one another, even though they don’t directly reference each other. If A and B are both cited by many other items, they have a stronger relationship. The more items they are cited by, the stronger their relationship is.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that when your site is indexed, the spiders look at who you’re linking to, to get an idea of what you’re talking about. So if you link to lots of sites that pay well, such as gambling etc, then the engines will think that’s what your site is about. Remember, they’re not too clever. So you need to make it clear to them what you’re about.

So the message I’m giving today is very simple. Be selective about who you link to. Only link to sites that are relevant to what you do. Because if you start linking every which way, then your rankings will drop like a stone. HOWEVER, because so many people don’t realise how they’re hurting themselves with bad co citation, it means that you can very quickly, and very easily leapfrog 90% of your competition.

Pete