What is SEO Co citation?

SEO Co citation: 

SEO Co citation is an identical measure used to establish a similarity in subject between two sites. The best example is, if site A is linked to site C and site B is also linked to site C, then site A and site B are related to each other, even though there is no direct relation. This relation between sites A & B gets stronger based on the number of links that they are linked identically.

In the above example sites A, B, C and D are related via co citation. There is no direct relation between them, but the sites that are linked to them tend to link to the other sites.

Want to know your websites co citation?

It's very easy to know our websites co citation. The 'similar pages' link that appears in search results next to 'cached' link is our site's co citation, means the sites that link to our sites tend to link to those sites as well. See the below figure.

If we want our website to rank high in SERP's we have to keep in mind about our linking neighborhood and co citation. Checking the pages where we are getting links from and who else are linked to those pages and checking whether those pages are related to our site will help us in better ranking.

Serious co citation services:

Some services that are related to co citation are as follows:

1.Directory/site research and locating.

2.Manual listing.

3.Link monitoring and evaluation.

4.Competitor analysis.

5.Link building.

6.Blogging.

Good and Bad examples of co citation:

Consider we have a site related to the sunglasses and we are looking for the back links. Suppose we bought a link in a page where our links looks like this:

Paid Advertisers:                 Online Casinos 

Sunglasses                           Gambling online

Cheap Viagra                      Cheap Drugs Online

Casino Betting                     Phentermine Cheap

Online Gambling                  Prescription Drugs

Here the search engines consider that our website is something related to gambling or drugs, because the page that we linked has the links that are related to drugs and gambling. This is a serious co citation and this is bad for rankings.

Coming to good co citation, if we got a page in directory pages like yahoo directory sunglasses page is great for our co citation. Because that page have the links related to sunglasses only and if we have a link in that page, search engines consider that our site is related to sunglasses and gives us the co citation of sunglasses. Now let us consider that we have a page in DMOZ also with the same companies that are listed in yahoo directory page then we have got some serious co citation with the right types of sites. By this good co citation we will get into the sunglasses neighborhood with other sunglasses sites. This will improve rankings.