The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

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 [...]

Enjoy a brand new cognitiveSEO Talks - On Search and Traffic with Dawn Anderson, an all-in-one professional that will make you take out a pen and a sheet and note everything she has to say.   There’s a lot to say about Dawn. She is a skillful digital marketer and SEO consultant with over 11 years of experience, Lecturer at Manchester University. She is also a speaker and trainer, contributing in international conferences and she also founded Move It Marketing Agency back in 2012. &nbs [...]

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 [...]

Since the last Penguin 4.0 (Real-time) update, lots of things have changed in terms of quality backlinks. Bad backlinks have remained the same, though, even if they were created some time ago with no intent to harm a website, or there was an arranged negative SEO attack or maybe a spammy link building campaign, with the purpose to rank high & fast. We've tackled this matter before, yet, we felt the need of updating this topic for 2018.     Toxic links have a higher effect on a [...]

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'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 [...]

Rumor has it that Bing from Microsoft can really take your marketing and SEO efforts to a whole different level. Is it true though that Bing can be gold when it comes to better traffic to your website, increased ROI, affordable advertising, convertible exclusive visitors, and an overall friendlier search environment?    Given that we don't lean on rumor, we figured out it's best to check ourselves what's there that makes Bing a smart target to marketers of all kinds.       [...]

Local SEO myths - what a tangled topic to discuss. You might get caught on the subject and start feeling intimidated thinking of the high amount of work you must do to rank in local SEO. Which, obviously, is unreal. Don't get us wrong: it's difficult indeed, but far from impossible.    In the local SEO area there are always new things to discover that can help your business get new customers, improve your visibility and get more local searches. Let's bury all the local SEO myths and misl [...]

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 [...]