Dutch Cowboys: four articles from 2011 to 2026

Dutch Cowboys is a Dutch platform about online marketing, technology and start-ups. I wrote for it as a guest blogger in 2011, 2012 and 2019. In 2026 the editorial team wrote about an experiment in which my name took centre stage. Together these four pieces show how my field shifted: from link building via YouTube to AI search engines.

2011: the latest trends in link building and social media

The first piece appeared on 13 May 2011, when Linkbuilding-Specialist was still based in Hoofddorp. The agency interviewed three Dutch link building agencies and four international link builders, including Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, initiator of the link building seminar in London at the end of March 2011. Read the background to the link building trends 2011.

2012: link building trends with eight experts

On 11 March 2012, by then from Amsterdam, a second round followed: seven Dutch link builders and a Belgian colleague on link building after Google's Panda updates. See which eight link builders took part.

2019: 11 YouTube SEO tips

On 29 November 2019 Dutch Cowboys published my eleven tips for making videos easier to find on YouTube, from keyword research to the thumbnail. Read the 11 YouTube SEO tips.

2026: the Google Gemini experiment

On 6 May 2026 Jeroen de Hooge wrote about an experiment by Stanley Leijnse, in which a made-up hobby in my name appeared as fact in Google Gemini within an hour. Read what the Gemini experiment showed.

What the four articles show together

The common thread is always the same: search engines reward what is consistent and confirmed by others. In 2011 and 2012 that was about relevant links. In 2019 it was about titles, descriptions and subtitles on YouTube. And in 2026 it was about which sources an AI search engine believes, and how quickly. That is exactly what I work on now with GEO for businesses and with the Google Knowledge Graph.

Summaries on my author site

A short summary of the articles from 2011, 2012 and 2019 is available on the publications page of gijs-bodenstaff.nl, my site as an author. On these pages you mainly read what the articles say about my work.