Why is MOZ Local not finding any of my citations?

[Dino64]

I ran a new client through the Moz Local Check My Listing and got this: It looks like your business wasn't found on any major search engines.

My client's website and Google Plus page have been live for over a month and he is listed in almost 90 business directories; all verified, live listings. Both his Yelp and Home Advisor profiles show well in search as does his website in organic so I know Google is picking up on the business. Checked all the simple stuff like correct spelling, url, etc. Any thoughts? Is this just a matter of time? If so, how long will it take MOZ to find a new listing usually? I see there is a MOZ index update scheduled for the 28th. Should I run it again after that?

Regards, Dino

[DavidLee]

Hi Dino

For Moz Local we only query and display listings from the following services on moz.com/local/search:

For business name and zipcode search

Google
Facebook
Foursquare
Yelp (need recommend reviews)
Superpages
Infogroup
Localeze
Yellow Pages
Factual
Citysearch
Best of the Web
Bing
Yahoo
Hotfrog
Acxiom

The links to these pages will not show up on Open Site Explorer as that tool is completely based on backlink strength to your website and has no relevance to the physical location of your business. These sites do have high authority but your links are likely too deep for us to index as those sites have millions of pages with listings.

Just so you know, here's how we compile our index for websites:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. So for Local Listings, you do not want to use OSE for citation research.

[Dino64]

I appreciate the responses, but my website shows only 2 external links. My business is listed in almost 80 different business directories (with links) and Moz can only find two? Yes, I have Yelp reviews and Moz can't even pick up a Yelp link? It can't find links from Google Plus, Yahoo, Twitter, Yellowbot, Citysearch, merchant Circle and all the rest. No links from the dozen or so press releases I submitted a couple of months ago. No links from the handful of guest posts or article posts I've done.

I could live with a few missing links. I know some are hard to pick up, but Moz is missing more than 90% of them. I don't see the virtue of this tool.

[DavidLee]

Hey Dino!

The check listing tool is a live search tool that queries various services in real-time. If you were to create a listing on Facebook and Google, it takes about an hour for us to pick it up. The Mozscape Index date you referenced is not related to Moz Local as it is a separate product. Those are for our backlink index for domains.

Ryan provided a list of the services we query and have offered some great advice!

Hope this helps!

[RyanPurkey]

My hunch would be the recency of the listings, as it sounds like they should be showing up. You mention a few local listing sites, but here's a longer list of places Moz Local checks: Google, Foursquare, Facebook, Yelp (with at least one recommendation), Superpages, Infogroup, Localeze, YP, Factual, Citysearch, Best of the Web, Bing, Yahoo, Hotfrog, and Acxiom.

If you're not in any of those, I'd add the business to the ones missing, and also try to get a few initial reviews between now and when the index updates. With those additions you should definitely begin to show up.