martinibuster - 7:52 pm on Dec 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

But linkless citations...wouldn't that depend on the engine's ability to discern the name of a site. Sometimes, the url of the site and the name that's known to the site's common users aren't the same.

I agree that would be stretching Google's ability to correlate the name of a site with the URL. However it's not a stretch to correlate an unlinked URL with the actual URL. Google is so eager to discover citations that they even find and crawl URLs in JavaScript.

The confusion commonly sets in where a webmaster sees an effect but guesses at the wrong cause. After Matt confirms that the claimed cause is incorrect the community accepts that at face value and moves on, without considering that the statement does not rule out other effects. This happened with the so-called sandbox and with Update Florida. So when a webmaster says, NoFollow Links pass pagerank and Matt says no, this isn't necessarily the end of the story.

We know that Google is discovering unlinked URLs and URLs hidden in JavaScript. Here's an interesting quote by a webmasterworld member [webmasterworld.com] about his experience in how Google treated the anchor text of URLs as actual URLs.

My Webmaster Tools crawl Errors page always contains bad url references that google picked up by reading the abridged version of a url shown in the link text of postings by forum software like vBulletin.

So here is a question that I think is at the heart of this idea of unlinked citations: Does it make sense to count unlinked citations as citations?

Does a citation have to be a link?