The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Bryan Stenslokken, SEO Manager at St. Louis-based internet marketing company Clix. “Below you will see presented another interesting recovery story from one of our great customers. Even with a sitewide link penalty reduced to a partial one, the site recovered its rankings. After nine months and another disavow the Partial penalty was removed also, leading to an even bigger ranking boost. It's a great story about organization, analysis and patien [...]

Building links to a website is one of the most crucial aspects of online marketing, because building links means you rank higher in Googles’ search engine, and Google still uses links as its main factor for ranking a website. The problem with link building is that it is more a problem of human persuasion than anything related to a mechanical algorithm. The process of link building causes us to naturally forget that websites don’t actually give the link. It’s people who link to websit [...]

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Dale Gillespie, one of our customers. “Below you will see presented an interesting recovery story from one of our great customers, Mr. Dale Gillespie. Happily, he chose to share with us his experience regarding a Google Penguin Recovery and a successful implementation of a 301 redirect strategy mixed with 404 on pages affected by unnatural links. It's a great story about perseverance, patience and thinking ahead!"   I'd like to share with [...]

Site hacking poses a constant threat for webmasters and online business owners. Whether you're just interested about how to deal with hacking, or unfortunately you've received a "Notice of suspected hacking" message in Google webmaster tool, in this article I`ll try to give you some tips on how to deal with it and how to even prevent it in the future. Even though Google does what it can to stop spam and SERP Hijacking, black hatters still use this shady tactic to rank up various sites. The ha [...]

As we think you already got used to, we at cognitiveSEO are ceaselessly working on improving our existing features or adding new ones in order to offer the best business solutions for our Cognitives, meaning our great customers. You might be already familiar with our fully customizable  SEO Dashboard  that we've launched around half a year ago and as we believe that  innovation is the key to success, we've included some new features to it.  We added more widgets to our already famous SEO [...]

Google wants us to use the disavow tool when we get a notice from them telling us we have websites pointing dodgy links at us. Although this would seem like a straight forward task, there are some myths and elements of confusion that have built up around using the disavow tool.As there are numerous people who are far more experienced and expert on this subject, I decided to ask a few. Here is what they said. I asked:What do you think the myths of using the Disavow tool are and what is the thing [...]

Time has passed since the Panda 4.0 update and there’s still a lot of talk around this subject. At that time, the headlines were filled with words of panic, which foretold an impending doom. Yet, time proved that the latest Google Panda shouldn't be brought in discussions in terms of penalties. Instead,  targeting and deranking low quality content would be more appropriate concepts to bring into discussion. So it seems that the Panda update should  affect the ones who do not comply with Go [...]

The use of a robots.txt file has long been debated among webmasters as it can prove to be a strong tool when it is well written or one can shoot oneself in the foot with it. Unlike other SEO concepts that could be considered more abstract and for which we don’t have clear guidelines, the robots.txt file is completely documented by Google and other search engines.   You need a robots.txt file only if you have certain portions of your website that you don't want to be indexed and/or y [...]

One of the most powerful types of content you will find the most rewarding is evergreen content. By identifying usable, evergreen content in your niche and publishing your own version you can boost the traffic and branding of your website. The best way to establish the types of content that are going evergreen in your niche is to see what the leading websites are doing. By analyzing the data from our target websites we can quickly ascertain which content is evergreen and still attracting eyeb [...]

 You can use this as one of your SEO strategies to create engagement. One of the things we do here, aside from trying to help others to figure out how SEO and Google works, is to deeply research any pattern and data we can, in order to best figure it out for ourselves. We keep a close eye on Google and the likes, ask questions and sometimes even make ranking experiments  to make sense of what goes on behind the scenes. But as is the case with all human observation (from quantum physics to soc [...]