Interesting Changes in Citations and Links this year.

Last year, as a matter of practice , when we did on line visibility programs for clients we added directory links to many of the major on line directories, yellow pages, and other local web sites.  We would then track the traffic from each (as part of the analytics) and quality scoring. Part of that was watching the back links report to see when the listing, citation or link was “indexed”.

We do much more than just this process during on line visibility programs, so we have a very rounded profile to drive traffic to a clients site.

The interesting thing is,  most of the local directory and y.p sites are no longer showing up as links, or as indexed, and the traffic to a clients site from these sources is way down

Here is an example.  Hot Frog has traditional been a good citation site and gets a lot of traffic.  But sine January, we have not seen a clients listing appear as a link to there site, and traffic is almost non existent.

This listing has been live for almost three months. No sign of it any where on Google Web Master, SEOmoz reports and any other reports we use.

I could add 10 more examples here.  But the point being, has the search world stopped recognizing this directory listings?  And if so how valuable are they to driving traffic to a site.

Let me know what you have seen.