What are Citations?
Citations are defined as “mentions” of your business name, address and phone number or NAP on other web pages.
The NAP (name address, phone) for the mentioned business must match the NAP in Google Places exactly to score as a citation.
Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms of the major search engines. Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.
Citations from well-established and well-indexed portals (like Superpages.com for example) help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business’s contact information and categorization.