SEO Interview Question

Question 1.What is the Difference between Google Panda and Penguin Update?

 –
Panda Update - This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.
Penguin Update - This Update was designed to remove/down the websites from index which were doing much more that white hat optimization like creating too many low quality backlinks, use of aggressive exact match anchor text, overuse of exact match domains, blog spam and low quality article marketing, keyword stuffing etc...

Question2. What is topic modeling? – Topic Modeling is a technique used by search engines to clearly analyse and identify the large volume of text on a webpage. Read more about topic modeling here: http://www.tdktech.com/topic-modeling

Question3. What is Pagination in SEO? – Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google's advice on using the pagination.

Question4. What are rich snippets? – Rich Snippets are the combination of structured data displayed in Google search results for better relevancy to the user and more data at a glance. Rich snippets are shown after google identifies any microformats (http://microformats.org/) structured tags embedded in your webpage coding, on sept 20th, 2012, Google also launched the new Rich Snippets testing tool and named it the structured data testing tool

Question5. What are URL parameters? – URL parameters are the values/attributes passed in the URL of a webpage to fetch any data from the database or to alter the order/structure of data displayed on the webpage, This is an important thing to consider while doing SEO for websites which uses URL parameters, especially e-commerce sites because these many times creates the duplicacy of content, you can handle this duplicacy using the rel canonical attribute and the Google webmaster tools, read more about configuring URL parameters in Webmaster Tools.

Question6. What is A/B testing and Multivariate Testing? – A/B testing is the testing of a webpage by creating its two different versions and redirecting some of the users to variation version from the original URL to know which version is more effective, multivariate testing is done using the software programs to dynamically insert/alter the components on a webpage and record the user interaction/behavior with all the combinations and identify the most effective combination. Google recommends using 302 temporary redirect while running the A/B testing in your website.

Question7. How to decrease the bounce rate of a webpage? – Using strong Call to Action within the text of the webpage (Known as contextual CTA), alongside with the content, improving design of the page, adding links to the related content, increase the speed of webpage loading, designing easy and user friendly navigation and overall creating a responsive design.

Question8. Why we use noodp in Meta robot tag? – To block the open directory project description from displaying in the search results, applies only to websites which are listed in ODP, i.e. dmoz.org.

Question9. What is Meta refresh tag, should we use it? – Meta refresh tag on a webpage send the user to another url after a specified period of time, typically in seconds. It is not recommended, rather use server side 301 redirect.

Question10. What are breadcrumb? – Breadcrumb is a website navigation system that clearly states the structure of website to both the users and the search engines, in case, making search engines clearly identify the structure ofwebsite, the microformats tags for breadcrumbs should be embedded in the HTML.

Question11. Is there a way we can tell Google that a particular webpage contains the Adult content? – Yes, we can do it by adding one of these two meta tags to that webpage 

1.    <meta name="rating" content="adult" /> OR

2.    <meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />

Question12. How Google treat links in PDF files? – Same as in the HTML pages, these passes the page rank, indexing signals and other data, it is not possible to nofollow the links in PDF files.

More Interview Questions:

 1- What is the difference between on page seo and off page seo?

On page seo means optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt etc.

Off page optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion.

2- How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

 3- What is keyword stemming?

It is the process of finding out the root word from the search query. A query having the word “ playful” would be broken down to the word “play” with the help of stemming algorithm. The search results returned would be having the word ” play” in it.

  4- What is LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a data retrieval technique which finds connection between words and the use of synonyms while fetching data from the index.

  5- What do you know about the Florida update?

Florida update happened on November 16th 2003. This update applied stemming, maintained local rank, penalized over optimized sites by applying filter etc. In short, it modified the search results before presenting it to the user by applying filters.

  6- What are the limitations of title and description tags?

Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and meta description tag can be between 160-170 characters.

 7- Does Google uses keyword tags?

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

 8- What is 301 redirect?

It is a method of redirecting user from the old page url to the new page url. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and is helpful in passing the link juice from the old url to the new url.

 9- What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?

Google recently had the Penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. Penguin update had penalized websites which had a spammy backlinking profile and returned more semantic results. Semantic results were based on the relationship between words present on the search query. Penguin trusted sites that had original content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.

10- What do you understand by Cloaking?

Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

11- What tools do you use for doing seo?

I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc.

12- What are your good qualities?

You will have to answer here about your good qualities like- I am hardworking, sincere, punctual, love to accept challenges etc.

13- What is the difference between Seo and Sem?

        Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization while Sem stands for Search Engine Marketing. Seo provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while Sem involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

14- What is PPC?

      PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords.

15- Which is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?

       Meta Robots tag is much better as it helps in forcing the search engine crawlers not to index and display the hidden pages in your server.

16- Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?

        Yes I use separate strategies for Google,Yahoo and other search engines.More backlinks are required for Google .It pays more attention to backlinks and site authority while Yahoo and Bing pays more attention to title and Meta tags. Hence, a site takes time to rank on Google as compared to Yahoo and Bing.

17- How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

        By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

18- How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?

        With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer, Backlink finder etc.

19- Which is more important- Building backlinks to a website or building great content?

        Both are important. Building great content is necessary as it is your first step towards ranking ;and building backlinks helps to build authority to your website and is an important metric for ranking well. Hence both should go parallel and both are equally important.

20- Who is Matt Cutts?

        Matt Cutts is the head of Google's web spam team.

21- If a website has a search engine saturation of 40% , what does that mean?

        It means 40% of web pages from that particular website are indexed by the search engine.

22- What do you mean by anchor text?

        Clickable text written on an hyperlink is known as anchor text. It is of great value to the search engines and is used for evaluating the relevance of web pages with respect to search queries. 

23- How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?

        Google loves web standards hence I will apply the web standards provided by W3C while optimizing a web site.

24- What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?

        I would use external style sheets, less images (unless necessary), optimize the images and decrease the file sizes of the image without reducing the quality of the image, use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests etc.

25- Which tools do you use for choosing keywords?

        I use Google Keyword tool, Wordtracker tool, Wordstream, Seo book keyword tool etc.

        *Remember certain tools are paid but you may use the trial version for some days.

 26- What blogs and sites do you regularly visit to update yourself?

        I follow Matt Cutts blog. Seomoz blog, Seochat forums, Searchengineland.com,Seo book, Seosandwitch :) etc.

 27- What are doorway pages?

        These are pages that are specially created to rank high on search engines using deceptive techniques.These pages do not provide useful content but instead redirect users to the main page.

28- What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?

       I have used blogs like blogger,wordpress,typepad etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg,Jumptags,Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook,Linkedin etc., Video Sharing sites like Youtube,Vimeo etc.

29-  What would you suggest to the client who has a website made on Flash?  How would you do Seo for that site?

    Search engines find it harder to parse the contents presented using Flash. I would suggest the client to use an alternative to flash like HTML 5.

30- What do you understand by Frames in HTML?

     A frame is a HTML technique which divides the content of a page onto several parts. Search engines see Frames as completely different pages and as such Frames have a negative impact on Seo. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

31- Which is the popular search engine in Russia?

      Yandex is popular in Russia.

32- If the meta robots tag has a value of "no index, no follow" what does it mean?

     It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.