Poll: Do Citations Still Matter for Local SEO?

A talk by Darren Shaw of White Spark at Mozcon this year is sparking off a bit of an argument in Local SEO. It led Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm to discuss it in their bi-weekly column on Street Fight Magazine. That question is, do citations or citation consistency still matter for Local SEO?

We’ve discussed other recent research on the subject such as Joe Youngblood’s study showing just how impactful keyword spam was in ranking a business in Google’s local pack regardless of citations (our emphasis not his). It is possible that Google has stopped using citations / consistency and started relying on their own (very flawed) internal data from Google My Business instead, or maybe not.

Tell us what you think. Do citations themselves, citation consistency, or both still matter for Local SEO?

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Do Citations and/or Citation Consistency Still Matter for Local SEO?