The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

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 [...]

A topic worth revisiting is how search engines handle diacritics in modern SEO. That is, how accented and non-accented characters (like “é” vs “e”) affect search visibility and organic performance. In this article, we look at how Google interprets diacritics today and what this means for search traffic in multilingual environments.   Let's get straight to the point with an example. Is there a difference between searching for “Haagen Dazs” versus searching for “Häagen Daz [...]

Even since we are in kindergartner until we take our grandchildren to visit the Natural Science Museum, we try to learn something. Luckily, learning is in our human nature. We try to learn something about everything and everything about something. And I think that this is great. Yet, what is even greater and maybe more meaningful is what we do with the things we've learned; how we make use of that information and how we change our course of action according to the data that we gathered. Digit [...]

Some say we are workaholics, some say we are perfectionists. What we say is that we do our best to provide our customers with the best experience they can get from using a SEO platform. The fall comes along with a partnership we are proud to introduce to you today. The cognitiveSEO + Searchmetrics integration provides unparalleled insight for any SEO Professional. In the following lines we are going to present you the importance of this integration and the benefits that you will get from [...]

Fortunately, we are all different. This means that different users require different necessities, and therefore, different dashboards and displays. After being closely in touch with our clients, we realized that "one-size-fits-all" dashboards are quite difficult to read and use. As nothing brings us as much joy as a happy customer with healthy search engine rankings, we started working on a new dashboard, based on the idea that it should be fully customizable to fit our clients needs. After long [...]

In a world where Google tries to make the SERP a safer place for its users, it seems SEO’s are exploring any opportunity in order to squeeze more visibility. Not long ago Google decided to remove Authorship photo’s from the results page in order to create a homogeneous and uniform look. One official explanation was given by John Mueller on a post from his Google+ account:We've been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile [...]

As an Online Marketer you always have to play your best game. Everyday, you are watched by Google or by your competitors. Having to watch web pages every day in order to find out ways to improve your site or to be careful of search engine optimization best practices is a cumbersome job. Google's algorithm is changing fast and it changes its mixture. As a consequence, the factors that you need to watch over are increasing from one day to another. Couple that with the time spent looking at page so [...]

Around the middle of the 20th century a certain myth started to "run" around among proponents of theories that emphasized a strong relationship between language, culture and perception. According to this myth, Eskimo people had an enormous number of words for “snow” (hundreds, according to some accounts). Two very important things were subsequently discovered. One was that most of these languages are polysynthetic, meaning that they could combine a limited set of roots and word endings to cr [...]

While there was a lot of talk about Penguin updates and the obsoletion of black hat SEO techniques, you will still have the chance of seeing them in full action, especially for very competitive keywords like viagra, cialis and payday loans. After the last Penguin update people had high hopes on abolishing black hat SEO. Everybody proclaimed the death of strategies including parasite hosting, cloaking and Google bombing.  The order on the search results was once more restored and everyone was ha [...]