Make Your Page Easy to Cite
A writer deciding whether to cite you is really deciding whether they can describe you in one clause: according to X, published in Y. If that clause is easy to write, you get the link. If working out who you are and when you said this takes thirty seconds of squinting at your footer, they quietly use a source where it didn’t.
Most of what decides this isn’t quality. It’s page furniture — the small, boring facts a citer needs in hand before attaching their name to yours.
The attribution clause
Every citation compresses your whole page into a fragment of somebody else’s sentence — usually a name plus a date, sometimes a name plus a role. The writer has to assemble it from what’s on the page, in seconds, without leaving it.
When they can’t, they have three options: cite you vaguely (“some sources say,” weak enough that most editors would cut it), go hunting for the missing pieces, which nobody mid-draft does, or find another page. The third wins most of the time, and you never learn it happened.
The checklist below isn’t a style guide: each item removes a specific reason the clause is hard to write.
Two dates, not one
Show when the page was published, and separately, when it was last changed. Both, labelled, visible without hunting.
An undated page could be from any year, and citing it means accepting an unbounded risk: if it turns out to be eight years stale, that’s the citer’s credibility, not yours. So careful writers skip undated pages and sloppy ones cite them badly. Neither outcome is what you wanted.
A single date forces a bad trade. Show only the original and a page you’ve kept current reads as stale; show only the update and an old page looks suspiciously fresh. Show both and the reader gets what they need: first published then, looked at recently.
A name attached to it
Name an author, or clearly identify the organisation behind the page. “The team” is not attributable. Neither is a byline that’s obviously a house pseudonym.
The reason isn’t vanity. A citation is a small transfer of credibility, and the citer needs to know whose they’re borrowing. Give enough to establish standing — not a résumé, just who this person is and why they’d know. A line is plenty. Organisations work fine as the author when the page is institutional. What never works is anonymity plus authority: confident claims nobody will own read as automated or evasive.
A title that reads like a source
Describe the claim rather than teasing it. A writer scanning for something to cite is matching your title against the sentence they just wrote. State the thing and the match is instant. Withhold it to earn a click — “The One Thing Nobody Tells You About X” — and there’s nothing to match, so the page never enters the comparison.
Titles are also how your page gets named in the linking sentence. “As explained in Why Deposits Are Held for Ten Days” writes itself; a teaser has to be paraphrased first.
One page, one subject, and headings to point at
A link points at a page, so the page should be about the thing being pointed at. When your explanation of one idea lives inside a guide covering nine, the citer chooses between linking the whole guide — which leaves the reader hunting — or linking a fragment, which most people don’t do. Usually they link something narrower elsewhere.
Inside the page, phrase headings as the thing they contain, not as a category. “Refunds take ten business days” is pointable; “About refunds” isn’t. Stated headings also let a writer confirm the page says what they think it says without reading it, which is the actual behaviour you’re designing for.
A URL that reads as permanent
Nothing in the address should look temporary. Session parameters, tracking junk, a date implying the page is one issue of something, a path with draft or v2 in it — each tells a careful linker the address may not survive. Documentation writers especially skip a URL they suspect will move, because a link that rots becomes a support ticket for them.
Then don’t move it. The links point at the address, not the words.
A summary near the top they can lift
Put two to four self-contained sentences at the top stating your answer. This is the passage most often quoted, and the fastest way for a scanner to confirm the page is what they need. Getting it right is one editing pass with more leverage than anything else here — writing claims people can quote covers sentences that survive being pulled out of context.
Nothing that ambushes the reader
A page that surprises people is unsafe to send them to. Interstitials, a signup wall between the reader and the answer, a modal on arrival, content that only appears after you interact with something, half the explanation locked behind a download — each makes the linker look bad to the person who followed their link.
Writers aren’t objecting on principle; they’re protecting their own reader relationship. Someone answering a stranger’s question won’t point them at a page that demands an email address, because it makes the help feel like a setup. Nobody tells you this happened. The link just doesn’t appear.
Say who you are
An about page does real citation work. It’s where a writer goes to answer “who is this?” when the byline isn’t enough — the difference between a site that seems to be somebody and one that seems to be nobody. Say what the site is for, who runs it, and what you claim to know. Ours exists as much for people deciding whether to cite us as for readers.
This isn’t a citation tax
Every item above also makes the page better for the people you wrote it for. Readers want to know how old something is and who wrote it, want a title that says what the page is about, want headings they can navigate and an answer near the top, and very much want not to be ambushed. None of this is optimisation for an algorithm or a favour to strangers — citability and ordinary usefulness point the same direction, which is why they’re worth doing on pages nobody has cited yet.
What to do next
Take your three most important pages and try to write the attribution clause for each using only what’s visible on the page. Whatever you had to guess at is the fix. Then keep them accurate without breaking the citations they collect, which is how to update a page people have already cited. And if a page passes this checklist and still earns nothing, the problem is upstream, in the conditions a page has to meet at all.