The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

It has been almost two years since the first Google Panda update went live. The biggest hits from that update were dealt to sites Google designated as content farms. Some well-known websites from the article marketing world suffered the greatest loss of visibility and keywords in search. These included article directories used heavily by online marketers and SEO's such as EzineArticles with a 90% visibility loss and Hubpages with a 87% visibility loss. In this post, we're going to look at how [...]

Can too few Brand Anchor Text or too much Commercial Anchor Text penalize a site? (note: commercial anchor text is also known as Money or SEO anchor text) Taking in consideration all the unnatural link penalties lately and the new ones to come, Google surely does not only look at the individual links, but it also looks at the Anchor Text Profile naturalness. Google tries to understand if the anchor text pointing to a site looks natural or not. This can be easily done by the search engi [...]

The world of link building is rapidly changing thanks to Google algorithms. Along with the loss of article marketing, blog networks, and other link strategies, the question remains: is link building through guest blogging on its way out too? The first piece of evidence to consider is the video by Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team.   The second is the number of blogs that are closing their doors to guest post submissions. The reason the doors are closing and Google is [...]

Even in a post-Penguin world, a well-rounded link building campaign generally includes links from web directories. The key is to make sure you are submitting your websites to quality directories. Quality Directory Checklist Here are some ways to test a directory to see if it is a good fit for your link building strategy. Domain Authority First off, you will want to make sure that the directories you choose for building links to your website have a good domain authority, Google PageRank, [...]

Last Friday, we quietly pushed another update to the cognitiveSEO toolset. We pride ourselves with the high level of support that we offer our customers and with the fact that we actually listen to your requests. A lot of you, have reported in the past, various features that you would love to see implemented in the toolset. With this update, as with any other, we tried to cover some of them. Here is the quick list of updates: 1. Ability to run Prefix based Backlink Analysis. You can [...]

We had a "full-house" Webinar on Friday (all 100 seats were occupied). As promised to everyone in the webinar here is the recording for to digest. Main Topics What are Unnatural Links? How do I spot them? How do I recover from an Unnatural Links Penalty? Quick Overview of the recent Interflora Penalty. "Unnatural Link" Sites Analyzed - Case Studies     SmartLipo - Medical Surgery Niche     Allesovergokken - Online Gambling Niche Netherlands     Webhostingmadness - We [...]

Updated: The recorded webinar can be found here. Since last year, it seems that Google started to aggressively clean its search index from sites that do shady link building practices involving the creation of unnatural links. Last year it started with Penguin , which was mostly about low quality links and this year it started with the Interflora Penalty that aims at “advertorial” content written with the pure scope of increasing search engine rankings. I have seen a lot of confusion ar [...]

After the last few days when every SEO pro, and his dog, wrote about the Interflora penalty, I decided to take a look into the case. What I found out is that, in my opinion, Google seems to enforce another old guideline. That is: "Advertorials" Google Advertorial Update Mockup I ran an indepth analysis on cognitiveSEO for Interflora and some of its top competitors, that are still ranking.Here are some of my findings. 1. The Interflora backlink profile does not look more unnatural, that a [...]

Another week … another highly requested feature is launched. After our latest successful upgrade last week, with the new Visual Link Explorer, here comes another feature.This new feature extends the overall functionality of the cognitiveSEO toolset by allowing tagging and tag filtering. What is a TAG in cognitiveSEO? TAG = “A label attached to something for identification or other information.” We added color to make it easy to spot and differentiate among various tags.   [...]

If you have a local business, or a business with some local aspect, then you can incorporate local link building opportunities into your SEO strategy. This can help you gain more variety in your backlinks as well as get exposure with your geo-targeted audience. The following are various local link building opportunities you can pursue for your business website and have a higher chance to increase your local rankings. Local Review Sites If you're not interested in the reputation management bene [...]