Technical SEO Assessment Questions and Answers

1. What is one way in which search queries evolved over the years?

• queries are much shorter
• fewer searches are coming from mobile
• more searches are using natural language
• keywords are now irrelevant

2. Which choice is an example of relative URL?

• <a href=”../page.html”>
• <a href=”../page/”>
• All of those answer
• <a href=”/page.html” 

3. You are planning for the development of an e-commerce website. Which approach will be more beneficial for ranking?

• Optimize the front page of your website to drive traffic from all category search terms
• Optimized all pages on the site from all category search terms
• Optimized product pages to drive traffic from individual category search terms
• Optimized product pages to drive traffic from individual category search terms.

 

4. What is a common best practice for handling search results pages on a blog's built-in-site search?

• Set site search result to no-index
• Do not use site search
• Set site search result to 404
• Add a canonical from the search result page to the home page

 

5. Your site serves identical content when you visit domain.com/page or domain.com/page?ref=123 . What should you implement?

• parameter stripping 
• a 302 redirect
• URL cloaking
• a rel=canonical link

6. On a large site, print page links that are indexable, crawlable and without canonicals will likely contribute to what issue?

• Duplicate content
• Pagerank inflation
• Soft 404s
• delisting

7. Which page title references content that is evergreen?

• Mega list of teams going to the olympics
• Complete coverage of Microsoft’s latest announcement
• The future of SEO in 2020
• How to reheat pizza

8. "Not provided" is an issue that provides which of these challenges?

• Inability to track accurate rankings
• Inability to track behaviour after users leave your website
• Inability to how many links are pointing to your website
• Inability to see keyword referral data from organic searches

 

9. What would contribute to a low bounce rate?

• Content does not search intent
• URL uses parameters
• Content reflects search intent
• Page return 404 error

10. Your client is ready to start a blog. but has read that they should put the blog on a subdomain instead of subdirectory in order to create more external links to  their website.  how would you advise  your client about this strategy?

• It is best to have the blog on a subdirectory and build links to primary domain

11. You notice that you have a backlink originating from a spam website and you cannot get the site  to remove it. What should you consider doing?

• disavow the link
• 301 redirect the link back to the spam site
• add the link to robots.txt
• remove the page to which the link is pointing

12. According to google, what type of content include topics such as news,legal issues, financial advice and medical information?

• YMYL
• KYC
• RSS
• BDB

13. When developing a backlink strategy, what approach would be most beneficial?

• Guest post the article to as many sites as possible
• create an infographics and share it with relevant bloggers
• create diverse and unnatural links
• distribute links in comment sections of websites

14. What is a key reason the URL domain.com/apparel/jackets is preferable to the URL domain.com/p=141?

• it is not preferable
• it is longer
• it uses structured markup
• it is readable to a human

15. Which HTTP response status code would indicate a page has been moved permanently?

• 302
• 200
• 41 0
• 301 

16. You notice a website is serving HTML to a Search Engine than to a human user. What is this an example of?

• Spam injection
• Sneaky Redirect
• cloaking 
• Splicing

17. What would significantly improve Google's ability to a non-YouTube video in its Search Results?

• add schema.org VideoObject 
• provide a 150 x80 pixel thumbnail image
• convert mp4 videos to mov
• embed video objects with JavaScript conditionals 

18. Google primarily determines indexing and ranking by crawling which version of a page?

• Responsive version
• desktop version
• submitted version
• Mobile version

19. you want to identify which US state has the most search interest for a particular keyword. What tool would help you determine this?

• Google search console
• Google keyword planner
• Google Trends

• Google analytics

 

20. Which statement is true regarding  the USE OF social  signals, such as linkedin shares by google in its ranking algorithm? 

• Google does not use social signals to determine rank
• Social signals are identical to backlinks
• social signals provide a benefit only if they have structured data markup
• social signals are use to determine topic authority

21. Which results is most likely if you use an interstitial pop-up that requires a user to take action before you load the content of the page?

• An industrial pop-up is treated the same as soft404
• Both the pop-up and the content of the page will be indexed
• the pop-up will be indexed instead of the desired body content
• The pop-up will be ignored and the content of the page will be indexed correctly

 

22. A user clicks an internal link resulting in this redirect chair http:// domain.com-> http:// domain.com->  http:// domain.com->. In this example, what is being consumed unnecessarily?

• velocity scale
• redirect allotment
• domain authority
• crawl budget

23. You notice a particular product in an e-commerce storefront is no longer indexed despite no technical issues. What is a likely reason for this?

• The keyword is too competitive
• No title or meta description tags were provided
• The product is out of stock
• Robot.txt is configured to allow access

 

24. Which approach is not advisable to Geo-targeting your website?

• using URL parametars
• using a ccTLD
• using a gTLD with subdomain
• using a gTLD with a subdirectory

25. You have been ask to help a big e-commerce brand optimized their website for search engines. They currently have thousands of products listed on their website. What is your most appropriate first step?

• Recommand that they add more products
• Register the business with a Google My Business account
• 302 redriect all product pages to a URL that contains target keywords
• Work on compressing image files

 

26. What Does The Term "Sandbox" Mean In SEO?

• the box with paid ads that appear when you perform a search
• This is where sites are kept till they get mature enough to be included in the top rankings for a perticular keyword
• A special category of sites that are listed in kid-safe searches
• The first 10 search results for a particular keyword

27. What is Anchor Text?

• It is the main body of text on a particular web page
• It is the text within the left or top panel of a web page
• It is the visible text that is hyper linked to another page
• It is the most prominent text on the page that the search engines use to assign a title to the page

28. Which Google search query should be used to return only PDF documents that reference Microsoft?

• Microsoft filetype:pdf

29. Which link is not crawlable?

• <a href="http://domain.com">
• <a onclick="newwin('domain.com')">
• <a href="http://domain.com" class="blue">
• <a href="/category_2/page">

30. Which choice represents the best header structure?

• H1: How to Bake Bagels

H2: Ingredients

H4: Dry Ingredients

H5: Wet ingredients

H6: Instructions

H1: Reviews

• H1: How to Bake Bagels

H2: Ingredients

H3: Dry Ingredients

H3: Wet Ingredients

H2: Instructions

H2: Reviews

• H1: How to Bake Bagels

H2: Ingredients

H3: Dry Ingredients

H4: Wet Ingredients

H2: Instructions

H6: Reviews

• H1: How to Bake Bagels

H1: Ingredients

H1: Dry Ingredients

H1: Wet Ingredients

H1: Instructions

H2: Reviews

31. You want to block crawlers from accessing your entire website. What robots.txt entry would you use?

• User-agent:

/Disallow:\*

 

• User-agent:

* Disallow: /

 

• User-agent:

\*Disallow: /

 

• User-agent:

Allbots Disallow:\*

32. All byline dates articles are suddenly no longer visible on a website's listing within Google search. Assuming no changes have been made to the site programming or content, what is the most likely cause?

• The site has been delisted from Google Search
• The site kept updating the date to make the content appear fresh, without changing the content
• The articles have aged more then 365 days without any significant updates to the content or the site.
• A Google New sitemap was not provided within 30 days of setting up a Publisher Center account

33. What is an example of a Google search result that can be found in position zero?

• Autocomplete
• Featured Snipped
• Google Ads result
• Related searches

 

34. When creating accessible video content, what should you consider including?

• Transcript
• Thumbnail
• Flash Player
• Event Tracking

35. You are optimizing a website that sells supplies for banking donuts. Which approach is most appropriate to drive more organic traffic?

• Add the keyword "donut supplies" to every page.
• Buy donutbankingssupplies.com and 301 redirect to your website
• Create a new blog with high-quality donut recipes
• Join a link farm to rapidly build inbound links.

36. Why is it important to be mindful of outbound follow links?

• There is a limit to how many links you can create.
• Any follow links reduce your PageRank by 1.
• Your site's reputation is tied to the sites you link to.
• All of these answers

 

37. Which statement is true about JSON-LD?

• It has no relation to JSON.
• It is the only structured data format available.
• It is considered the most complicated approach to adding structured data.
•  It is Google's preferred structured data format.

38. What is a key reason why duplicate content might cause an issue with ranking?

• It creates an inability to use canonical URLs, which dramatically reduces crawl effectiveness,
• It requires using a 302 redirect, which dilutes PageRank.
• It triggers an immediate manual action penalty, which delists an entire domain until the duplicate content is removed.
•  It makes it difficult for a search engine to determine the original and authoritative content source.

 

39. What attribute would you use to describe the content of an image?

• Tabindex
• Longdesc
• alt
• src

40. You are researching keywords for a client and creating a list for an optimization plan. Which is not a recommended method of creating keyword lists?

• synonyms and related words
• queries about benefits, features, problems
• focusing on only high-volume, high-popularity words
• how-to and question-based queries

41. You want to get a rough idea of how many searches per month a particular search term gets. Which tool do you use?

•  Google Keyword Planner
• Google Tag Manager
• Google Search Console
• Google Suggest

42. Changing the title tag and/or meta description will have a measurable impact on your ____.

• RSS
• PPC 
• CTR
• LSI

43. You are optimizing a site that receives a lot of user -submitted comments many of which contain promotional links according to SEO best practices how should you treat the comments?

• Bold important keywords in comments
• be sure links are using keyword-rich anchor tags 
• Set links in comments to be nofollow
• Disallow each link submitted

44. What should you avoid when developing a search-optimized website?

• Canonical URL
• Automatically generated content
• Embedded videos
• Long –form content

45. What  should be as consistent  as possible across the web when developing a SEO strategy?

• NAP
• Inbound links
• LRP
• Backlinks

46. What choice is not a primary component of a SERP snippet?

• URL
• Catche
• Description
• Title

47. A user enters a search _ to receive results from a search engine?

• Query
• Link
• Bar
• parser

48. What is a popular technique for writing content  with the goal of having  it appear in featured snippets?

• Submit the content through google search console and tag it with the correct snippet type
• Write a question in a heading, then answer it below in a format that matches the snippet type
• Use the featured snippet schema and apply an object that matches correct snippet type
• Google manually generate featured snippet,so there is no special technique

49. The search query “how to make donuts without yeast” is an example of what?

• Fresh keyword
• Long-tail keyword
• Operative keyword
• Short-tail keyword

50. You request a URL and the text on screen displays “oops!the page you are requesting wasn’t found”. However the HTTP response is 200. How should  you resolve this?

• Configure the server to return a 500
• Configure the server to return a 418
• Configure the server to return a 404
• Leave it as is-a 200 response is accurate

51. How do keywords change as people progress through the buying cycle?

• They move from simple to more complex as searcher gather more information and then refine their choices
• They stay simple as searcher try to use as few words as possible
• They move from complex to simple, as searcher find answer to their question
• The keywords do not change much at all

52. Which search query would be most difficult to determine search intent?

• XBox live coupon
• LAX airport directions
• microsoft Office 365
• Linkedin login

53. What is the anchor text in this code sample?

<a hrefs"catalog/gloves.html/">Blue Gloves/a>

• Blue Gloves
• gloves.html
• catalog/
• href

54. What is a meta description used for?

• To assign schema markup
• To bundle meta tag
• To summarize the content of webpage
• To describe images

55. You want to set the title of a webpage. Which html tag would you use?

• <title></title>
• <head></head>
• <site></site>
• <h1></h1>

56. Which backlink would you expect to be treated as the least important?

• a link matching the background color
• a link in italics
• a link in the bottom of the body content
• a link at the bottom of a list

57. Which tool enables companies to display extra information within the natural search results without the need of any structured data?

• Google Input Tools
• Structured data testing tool
• Google Tag Manager
• Google My Business

 

58. What is the dwell time in this scenario?

1. User searches for "Bagel Recipes"

2. User spends 1 minute reviewing results

3. User clicks a result: "Brad & Jeff's Bagel Recipe Blog"

4. User spends 3 minutes reading article

5. User clicks back to search results

6. User spends 2 minutes reviewing results

• 6 minutes
• 1 minute
• 3 minutes
• 2 minutes

59.You are searching for a website that was published within the last week. When you type in the URL, the site does not appear in Google search results. Why might this be?

• The website does not have a high enough domain authority
• A sitemap has not been submitted to google
• The website does not provide useful information
• Google has not yet crawled this website

60. A web page has this tag: <title>Brad’s Bagels: How to Bake Bagel</title>.However, google search results for this page displays the title: Brad’s Bagels: Baking Bagels in the oven. What is a likely explanation?

• The title tag was placed within the<head>section of the web page, but not before the meta content tags, so Google cannot identify the actual title
• A breadcrumb navigation is in use, which overrides the title tag supplied in the HTML
• The page is using Structured data to define an alternative title object, which allows the search engine to pick a preferable version.
• Google generated a new title using text on the page that more closely matched the search query

61. What might help a search engine understand the difference between an articles on a dog bark vs tree bark?

• Knowledge graphs
• Ranked choice trees
• Tertiary analysis
• Semantic analysis

62. What alt attribute should be assigned to an image of a decorative line being used to separate content?

• alt=”Thin black line being used to separate two blocks of content”
• alt=”thin-line”
• alt=””
• alt=”dec”