Co-citation is the process of helping someone else to build up their SEO so that you gain credibility. It increases the ranking authority on your own website as well as the site in which you have helped. Working SEO on someone else’s page helps your own page to gain a stronger online reputation. So how important does co-citation play in for the future of SEO? In order to answer that you have to look at some of the changes that have taken place in the online arena over the past few years.

Changes to Google’s algorithm

The first factor that you have is the changes to Google’s algorithm. These were the Panda changes that took affect early in 2012, and were responsible for plummeting rankings for thousands of websites. These changes marked the end of a lot of the common SEO practices that were not really offering value but were used as a means to an end. Things such as link-building and having little to no content on your website were penalized. The benefit to other site owners that had relevant content and used the co-citation methods was the fact that these sites began to experience an improvement in their overall rankings, as they gained a stronger authority by helping other websites to improve rankings.

Reputation Management

What is better than reputation management? Reputation improvement, this is when rather than trying to manage what others are saying about you, you go out and you help other people to achieve their goals. As they start talking about how you helped them you will start to see an improvement in your own rankings. Some of the top Guru’s online today use this strategy. They take on some students and help these students get set up. These students go on to do very well and they start to share about how so and so helped them to become success. While this is not directly related this is the same concept that we are talking about here; improving your own sites authority by using co-citation to help someone else improve their rankings on the search engines.

Websites were co-citation work well

There are some websites were co-citation work well when you are looking to improve your overall SEO. Websites that you can control like SlideShare, Google+, Youtube and others, these sites allow you to talk about your brand, build your reputation, and include links that will direct back to your website. The future of SEO is in the social media, the connections, creating engaging content and sharing new ideas in an innovative way. The more you put out there the more that will come back to you.