Is there any SEO benefit of being cited in professional & text books?

[arohan]

I have asked this question before a few years ago but now I am finding more and more of my pages/resources being cited in professional books and text books published by high caliber publishers like Wiley.

The difference between then and now is that now these citations are easily found via a google search on my site domain.tld and it brings up the relevant section of the books in question in Google Books. The citations go to relevant pages on the website (aka deep link).

None of this is pursued, obviously, and in my mind these should carry more authority boost than a regular link. Professional books and text books take months or years to write and every reference in there is rigorously curated and relevant.

So my question is, if Google can find these citations (as I can do a search and find these on Google Books), does it put any SEO value on them (such as an authority boost)?

[goodroi]

Any benefit? Yes

Significant benefit? Debatable, IMHO

Personally I would want to always be cited because it can help my overall marketing & branding strategy. I like to take a more holistic approach and generally don't view SEO as an isolated issue.

[lucy24]

How does a search engine find out about the citations? A link in a printed book has to be typed-in* by the user; it's not something the search engine will find in the course of its ordinary crawling. When they scan material for Google Books, do they concurrently run OCR on every page (including the non-displayed ones for recent publications) and look for any occurrence of "http(s)://" ?

The other big If is that a link in a printed book refers to the material that was online at some particular moment. You could come around the next week and change every word on the page, or take down the whole site (one reason archives have become essential). So the search engine has no way of knowing what the book was actually citing, except for quoted text that is or is not still present.


* If you're lucky enough to have content that might be cited in print, please use short friendly URLs that a human would really be able to type in.

[goodroi]

Here are 3 ways being cited in a book can lead to seo benefits and I bet there are bunch more if I had more time to think about it:

a) The book is digitized and they link to you
b) You get a wikipedia page from it
c) Being cited in a book leads to online press mentions

[Sand]

I've told this story here before, but here is something that happened to me:

I had a site that was basically a baby (it wasn't even ranking for its name yet). I wanted to jump start things, so I put together a big piece and pitched it to a few newspaper journalists. One very big newspaper picked it up, and it was printed in their Sunday edition.

In the paper, my website was named (but not linked, obviously -- it's a newspaper afterall). A lot of people typed my domain directly in their address bar, but thousands still went to Google and searched for the domain. After this, more and more newspapers picked it up, and the same thing kept happening.

This had a big and lasting impact for the site, as it went from feeling like a baby site to a somewhat established site pretty much overnight. I attributed it to the volume of people typing my domain into Google. There really wasn't anything else tangible to attribute it to.

Now, you probably wouldn't get that much volume from a text book or professional book (it's possible, of course -- it just depends how many people read it), but I do think it could help -- even if the citation itself doesn't.

[arohan]

Thank you all.

@goodroi: Thanks. I hope some of what you say comes into play. It is indirect for sure and I am looking at this very holistically. It is not even something I check for, just found these by accident today and wondered.

@lucy: They must be running OCR for Google Books because when I do a regular Google search, it finds these books and takes me to the relevant page with the actual website name highlighted in yellow (I used my website name as the search query). The citations are full path to the page on my site. It is not a link but it does seem Google knows it is there. Whether they have gone beyond pattern matching to actual parsing for references and entity relationships from the content in Google books is something I am not sure of.

You are right that pages change and I could in theory change the content after getting these citations, so keeping this in mind, wouldn't these citations convey more trust from the citation givers end? In reality though, I am writing about my expertise (that I am very well qualified to do) and questioning some of the prevailing academic wisdom on these pages and it is highly unlikely that I am doing this for a transient link or two. Since I have built my reputation (such as it is) based on my point of view expressed in those pages, they are not going to change substantially unless I am proven incorrect.

One of the authors and his publisher obtained my formal written permission allowing them to cite my work and my web page.

@sand: appreciate your recount of your experience. I do get a good number of type in traffic. Not sure if these citations have helped as they are more niche texts and by nature the audience is small. But I have to believe that even if it is a small number of people who come in this way, they are probably going to be more than a "casual surfer" and this should lead to new possibilities.