The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

You may have noticed that when you use Google to search for a certain answer to a question, a lot of times you actually get some sort of answer and not just a series of search results. For instance, if you’ve just recently made a terrible decision about changing your go-to barber’s shop  and would like to find out how soon the damage will fade away, you might ask Google “how fast does hair grow”, to which the famed oracle of wisdom will give an actual answer, in what we will refer to as [...]

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 [...]

It is pretty much agreed that Google can and probably does read metadata embedded in photos, though whether that influences SEO in any way is still disputed. In fact, the conventional wisdom seems to be that search engines do not take into account photo-embedded text (assuming they can read it at all) and that the practice of embedding text in photos is generally a bad idea for a series of other non-SEO reasons (mostly having to do with accessibility of the information for the user). At the sam [...]

No longer than one year ago, on June 11th 2013, Google, launched a new algorithm whose main purpose was to clean some very “shady” niches, such as “payday loans” or “buy Viagra”. These are very controversial niches that everybody knew about but hardly anybody talked about. One year earlier, in 2012 we tried to fire a warning shot concerning this matter,  but Matt Cutt's answer came out 1 year later, when they released the initial Payday Loans Google Update. “There were people c [...]

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 [...]

In the last week, many speculations have been made regarding what Panda 4.0 has really impacted in terms of ranking and site.  As Google representatives didn't feel like talking too much about what this update is really about, the SEO world was caught on fire by suppositions and advice about how we should effectively stay safe in front of the big angry Panda. It's indeed a bit early to draw 100% guaranteed conclusions about what the 4th Google Panda is impacting. Yet, we think that the best to [...]

You may never know when you are going to stumble on an unnatural links penalty, whether it’s algorithmic or manual. And you’re going to have to deal with that problem one way or the other. When you’re trying to get rid of those harmful backlink profiles, one solution that prevailed is to remove the page from your site to which the unnatural links were pointing. You’re going to swiftly deal with the problem, but you’re going to remain with a page that will give the 404 message. Will [...]

Less than 24 hours ago, Matt Cutts, the head of the spam team from Google, announced via Twitter that Google is rolling out the Panda 4.0 update starting today. Although many speculations regarding the rise of a possible Penguin 3.0 have been made, it's about that time of the year when SEO news is a-buzz with one particularly cute animal: panda. Only it's not our Chinese bear darling that's occupying the minds of web experts, it's the Google algorithm. However, all the Google updates speculat [...]

Art is not, as the meta-physicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being [...]

I think it's no secret for anyone now that cats rule the internet, and, in a more conspiratorial note, maybe the world. If a couple of years ago we found it hilarious that in Ancient Egypt cats were worshiped and considered gifts from the Gods, nowadays the fluffy felines are back in power. When Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, was asked at the celebration of the 25th birthday of the web what was the most surprising thing about his invention, he reacted promptly: “Cats! I [...]