The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

At cognitiveSEO we’re not just about creating new features or tools, but also about recognizing when existing tools are vital to our customers’ businesses. Our users’ experience is what matters most to us and what helps us evolve. So when something is as ubiquitous as Google Analytics, we think the best thing we can do for our users is to make it easy for them to use it as part of our existing tool. No more switching between tools, no more wasted time with mixing and matching results and c [...]

Update September 23, 2016: Real Time Penguin is now live! Google just announced on their official Webmaster blog that after a period of development and testing, they are now rolling out an update to the Penguin algorithm in all languages. Aside from the fact that Penguin's data is now refreshed in real time so that changes will be visible much faster, Penguin is now more granular. The Penguin algorithm will be able to devalue spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting [...]

Neo: If you're killed in the matrix, you die here? (The Matrix, 1999)   We often make a distinction between the virtual and the real world. We will ask whether something happened online or “actually happened”, as if the online world were a parallel universe in which actions have no impact on our current lives. But the truth could not be further from that. Most of the things we do online can impact our “real”, palpable lives. Our perception and our laws may not have caught up to [...]

Update: 15th June 2015 : Penalty Recovery in 6 Days - Thumbtack rankings seem to have recovered after only 6 days of penalty. You can skip the Penalty Analysis if you are interested in the Recovery Analysis only.   This is the very interesting penalty and surprisingly fast recovery story of Thumbtack, an online platform that allows service providers and consumers to find each other and negotiate jobs online. We don't know if it has something to do with its swift rankings recovery or n [...]

Having a Google Links Penalty is not something you wish for, but it’s something that you might have to deal with if Google found those rotten links in your link profile. In today’s article we’re going to analyze the process of creating a Google Disavow file, submitting it to Google and tracking the results.   To provide help to the people who practiced "bad" link building in the past and were in search of ways to clean up their messy link profile, in October 2012 Google launched the d [...]

Probably you are familiar with the story of the two English salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back home. And one of them wrote: "Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes." And the other one wrote: "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet."  There's a similar situation when it comes to The Disavow  Tool also, because there are some people who think that it's an ov [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

 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 [...]