Adrian Cojocariu - cognitiveSEO Author

Content syndication can be a great way to drive traffic to your site, get exposure and maybe even improve you rankings. But, on the other side, it can also turn out to be devastating, if played wrong.   The main concern when it comes to syndication is duplicate content. Will Google penalize you if you take other people's content and place it on your own website? Will it hurt your SEO? Then, there's also a concern regarding rankings. If you have a small website, will you be able to rank ab [...]

We all keep hearing that any publicity is good publicity. But is it really so? And, more importantly, is it the same for SEO? We've all heard about the link building technique using unlinked Brand Mentions  It's a good method and, as far as we know, it works very well.   But what if the unlinked brand mention that you're so excited about turns out to be a RipoffReport post? What if it's a blogger complaining about your services, or a news publisher reporting on some incident regarding y [...]

One of the first things that beginner SEOs get in contact with is link building, often far before they even hear about content quality or even basic things like proper keyword research or title optimization.    Link building is the most controversial topic in SEO and I believe that we should encourage people on not focusing too much on links alone . And in years of doing link building campaigns, I've learned a thing or two.  So here they are: 12 lessons I've learned from dozens of lin [...]

There are many questions about canonical tags that could have landed you on this page. What are canonical tags? When to use them? Do canonical tags impact SEO in any way?   We know, there's a lot to take in. But do you know what the good part is? This article will answer everything you need to know about canonical tags!     Quick answer: Canonical tags affect SEO from two points of view. For once, they directly influence how search results display. They can also influence t [...]

There's a lot of confusion when it comes to meta descriptions and SEO. Do they affect search engine rankings? Is it worth spending the time to write a good meta description?   Well, in theory, meta descriptions do not affect SEO. This is an official statement from Google, released in 2009. However, since meta descriptions show in the search engine results, they can affect CTRs (click through rates), which are linked to SEO & rankings. So, in practice, meta descriptions might have an i [...]

Wikipedia is one of the most (if not THE most) authoritative sources on the internet. With an average of 8 billion pageviews every single month and over 6 million articles posted only in the English version of the colossus, Wikipedia claims its well deserved spot as the 5th most visited website of the planet.   Yet, it does not serve any ads to its users. How is this possible? Every other site you visit on a daily basis probably runs ads to survive. How come the 5th most visited site in t [...]

You've probably heard about internal linking a lot, because everyone is talking about it. But what's all the fuss about? Should you really bother doing it? Is it really that effective? If yes, why? There are many questions to be answered.   During our cognitiveSEO talks, many guests talked about the importance of interlinking between your own web pages. Therefore we decided to tackle this subject and let you know about the best internal linking strategies.      What Is [...]

If you own a website, especially one with English content, chances are that you will get spammed, sooner or later. If you don't start protecting yourself as soon as possible, you will definitely have some trouble with it.   To help you out, we've gathered a list of 5 most common types of SPAM and what you can do to protect yourself against them. You'll see what exactly SPAM is, why people practice it and how you can fight it back.     Comment Spam Trackback Spam Nega [...]

Do you have a local business, or maybe clients that own local businesses? If yes, then you're in the right place, because you're going to find out how you can double or even triple their click-through rates on Google.   People often think that they can only rank once for a keyword. For the most part that's true, because Google has gradually restricted the number of times you can show up with the same domain on the same search query. However, things are a little bit different when it comes [...]

We all know that BlackHat SEO is considered to be a bad thing. One might think: "as long as you can rank a website well with it, it must be good; there are risks of getting caught and penalized by Google's algorithms, but most people take that risk, don't they?"    Well... actually no. BlackHat SEO really is a bad thing. Not only for the one that uses it, but for you and everyone else, as well. Why? Because most BlackHat SEO tactics started off as legitimate ways to optimize your websit [...]