SEO Interview Questions and Answers (part 2)

SEO Interview Questions and Answers for both experienced SEO & freshers as well.

If you are fresher than must read each and every question either you know the answer or not instead of this if you are experienced SEO can focus only those from which you are not familiar.  Here are 100+ top best SEO interview questions. You going to attend SEO interview then once have a look on advanced SEO interview questions which may be asked you. (part 2) 

Q100- Can search engines see password protected pages?
Ans- Due to security purpose website owners don’t allow search engines. If we have website which is password protect and a user can’t view after login than the search engines also can’t see it.

Q101- Which of the following file is created to give instructions to SE bots?
Ans-

a. Index.html
b. Spiders.txt
c. sitemap.xml
d. Robots.txt
e. Searchbot.xml
Ans:  D- website owner use robts.txt file to give instruction to search engine tools.

Q102- Your website is flagged as having malware, but you can’t find the malware. How will resolve this issue or what will you do?
Ans- Very first step I will submit reconsideration request to respect search engine. If problem not resolve will post my problem in Google Webmaster help forum and take others advise and try another option via tweeting @Google.

Q103- What is PPC?

Ans- PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively.Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords.

Q104- How you will good click through rate (CTR) in pay per click (PPC)?

Ans- It’s not an easy task but can improve CTR via keeping these points in mind

• First select the correct keywords
• Target your ads to right audience
• Target your ads according to language.
• Make your budget before starting PPC
• Create different Ad Groups for different search phrases/keywords
• Keep analyze your ads on daily basis and change it if you are not getting sufficient results from it.

Q105- What does the abbreviation PPC stand for?
Ans- Pay Per Click (PPC) measure how much online advertisers must pay each time their advertisement is clicked on.

Q106- What is 301 redirect?

Ans- 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.

Q107- What is the difference between 301 redirect & 302 redirect?
Ans- 301 Redirect – 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to new page or location.
302 Redirect – 302 status code means that a page has temporary moved to new page or location.

Q108- What is the difference between soft 404 and 404 errors? How will you find and remove these errors?

Ans- A 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server is unable to find that resource so it returns 404 file not found error. On the other hand, soft 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server returns 200 OK response for a file that does not exist on the server. Hence, in both the cases, file is not present on the server but in case of soft 404 the server returns 200 OK response codes by mistake. We can find out these errors with the help of Google Webmasters Tool and we can either remove them by adding proper redirects and by creating a custom 404 page for helping the user in proper navigation while browsing the site.

Q109- How will you increase the Page rank of a page?

Ans- To increase the page rank of your webpage, you must build more backlinks from high page rank websites and authority sites.

Q110- How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?

Ans- I usually apply the web standards from the W3C while optimizing the webpage, which help that site to get more points from Google to improvise page rank.

Q111- What is Cloaking?

Ans- Clocking is the procedure of using some deceptive techniques which allows the user with a different version of the website than that presented to the search engines.

Q112- What do you mean by Cloaking?

Ans- Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing search. In this technique a different content will be searched by the search engine than what is presented or searched by the users.

Q113- What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?

Ans- We can use the external style sheets, minimum images, decrease the file size of the images that we use, without compromising on the quality and use the CSS sprites to regulate the HTTP requests.

Q114- What do you know about LSI?

Ans- LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race etc.

Q115- How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?

Ans- To check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the websites statistics, which tells you about the origin of traffic.  The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.

Q116- What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to new domain?

Ans- The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

Q117- Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?

Ans- From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs have to be implemented.

1.    Good Internal link structure

2.    Generation of dynamic title and description

3.    Dynamic XML sitemap generation

Q118- What is the latest update in SEO?

Ans- The latest updates in SEO are:

1.    Panda

2.    Penguin

Q119- What are the key aspects of Panda update?

Ans- Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.

Q120- What do you know about Google Panda update?

Ans- The Panda update was done to improve the quality of search results in Google. Panda update also known as the farmer update was done to eliminate content farms which provided less user friendly  experience. It used machine language scalability as one of the important metrics for judging relevancy of a web page. All the focus was transformed on the user and now quality content , proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and videos, content to ad  ratio all mattered more after the Panda update. You need to optimize your site for better clickthrough rate and a less bounce rate.

Q121- What are the key aspects of Penguin update?

Ans- Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.

Q122- How will you plan an Seo strategy for a website already affected by Penguin update?

Ans- Penguin update deals with scanning through the link profile of a website. I will scan the links pointing to the site using tools like ahrefs and prepare a list of low quality links. I will make every effort to get those links removed like emailing the webmaster. If somehow, I am unable to remove some links then I will use the disavow links tool to devalue the remaining links from harming the site. Apart from this, I will plan a link bait strategy to get some high authority links in order to increase the reputation of the site. This will surely help a site to recover from the effects of the Penguin update.

Q123- How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?
Ans- Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.

Q124- What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?

Ans- Google recently had the Hummingbird update which was a change in the core search algorithm. Google moved from keyword based searching to concept based searching. It included semantic level analysis in order to find out real answers and searcher’s intent behind the user query. I would add comprehensive and fresh content to my site after the Hummingbird update.

Prior to the Hummingbird update, Google 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 and good content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.

Q125- What all verticals have you handled in your SEO career so far?

Ans- Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, shopping, jobs etc.

Q126- How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

Ans-.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.

Q127- What do you know about the Florida update?

Ans- 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.

Q128- Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?
Ans- Yes, as these are different search engines so need to use different strategies for each. 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.

Q129- What was your exact job profile in your previous company?

Ans- Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.

Q130- What are your good qualities?

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

Q131- If a website has a search engine saturation of 40%, what does that mean?

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

Q132- How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?

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

Q133- What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?

Ans- 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.

Q134- What blogs and sites do you regularly visit to update yourself?

Ans- I follow futuredigit blog. Seomoz blog, Seochat forums, Searchengineland.com,Seo book, Seosandwitch, Seroundtable, Seobythesea, seochat etc.

Q135- What are doorway pages?

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

Q136- What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?

Ans- I have used blogs like blogger, wordpress, typepad, tumblr etc, social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc., Video Sharing sites like Youtube,Vimeo etc.

Q137- Which is the popular search engine in Russia?

Ans- Yandex is popular in Russia.

Q138- If the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean?

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

Q139- Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?

Ans- Nofollow links are not passed by search engines bot and therefore cannot be cached or indexed. Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink and it passes through all search engines and it puts an impact over page rank.

Q140- Who is Rand Fishkin?

Ans- Rand Fishkin is the CEO and Co founder of Seomoz, the most popular seo software in the world. He started the informative “White Board Friday” series for explaining the concepts related to Seo and search engines.

Q141- How will you restrict the search engine crawlers from indexing a folder named “Secret” that is present in the root?

Ans- The following code when added on the robots.txt text file would restrict the crawlers from accessing the folder

User-agent:*
Disallow: /Secret/

Q142- What do you understand by Google Dance?

Ans- Google Dance happens when major updates happen on the database maintained by Google. Constant shuffling leads to unstable rankings of the Web Pages.This continues for some days and is known as Google dance. It was witnessed in the past before the real time searching happened. Now, Google updates its index almost everyday and changes are witnessed narrowly.

Q143- Which are the top 3 social media websites that you will suggest to your client for SMO work?

Ans- I would suggest Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Q144- How Google Plus does helps in Seo?

Google Plus helps the promoted web pages to get plus ones which are considered as genuine votes by Google. More plus ones helps to enhance our search engine rankings. Moreover, it helps to get high rankings in personalized search results where our friends can see the web pages shared and promoted by us.

Q145- What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?

Ans- Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as “Pizza Box”.

Q146- How important is to have a keyword in a domain name?

Ans- After the recent EMD update, the weightage on the presence of keyword on a domain has reduced. It is therefore important to go for a domain name that can focus on building a brand rather than using only keywords which could make a domain look spammy. Although having keywords in the domain helps but it would work only if the combination comes out as brandable. Some popular examples of website which succeeded without having keywords in it are flipkart.com, myntra.com, ebay.com, digg.com, reddit.com and ofcoz google.com etc. But, there are some themes where the presence of keywords becomes necessary like the presence of the keyword “recipes” in allrecipes.com or the presence of the word “food” in the domain foodnetwork.com. Hence, it’s important to take decisions based on the theme you need to target.

Q147- What do you understand by “Engagement Metrics” with relation to social media?

Ans- Engagement metrics comprises of information which is used to measure the importance of user (customer) engagement with respect to a particular social data. Some example includes  likes, retweets, plus ones, clicks, favorites, repines, comments etc.

Q148- Have you heard about ASO?

Ans- ASO stands for App Store Optimization which is a process of improving the visibility of mobile apps on app stores like iTunes and Google Play.

Q149- How can you search with the exact keywords you type on Google without using quotes?

Ans- We can use the Verbatim tool in order to search with the exact keywords entered on Google.

Q150- What do you understand by Google Authorship and how can you use it for Seo benefits?

Ans- Google Authorship allows you to link your Google Plus Profile to the content you create. This is a way to enhance the overall user experience and stop spamming. Results containing content from original and reputed authors are valued highly by Google and chances of spamming are also reduced. Hence, implementing Google Authorship is really useful for Seo as it helps a webpage to rank higher based on the author rank.

Q151- How can you make a website mobile friendly?

Ans- I will create a mobile friendly version of the website for Googlebot-Mobile, use meta.txt for specifying special instructions to mobile search engine crawlers use mobile.xml sitemap and will have mobile optimized content on the site.

Q152- Can you mention the functions of body content relevance?

Ans- Whenever there is a text that does not have images on the web page is referred as body content relevance or non-image text. It helps in good optimization of the sites and also to improve your ranking in the search engine.

Q153- What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?

Ans- On doing search on your domain and if nothing appears then there are three possibilities.

1.    May be the site is banned by search engines

2.    May be no index by search engines

3.    Some canonical issues

Q154- Name some SEO blogs that you frequently read?

Ans-

1.    Jimboykins

2.    Search Engine Land

3.    SEOSmarty

4.    MOZ

5.    Search Engine Journal

Q155- How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?
Ans- I personally use for web standards from the W3C whenever optimize any website, which help me to get more points from Google to improvise page rank.

Q156- What will you do to decrease the page loading time of a website?
Ans- It’s little technical and we cause external style sheets, less images, try to decrease the file size of image without compromising the quality and use CSS sprites to regulate the HTTP requests.

Q157- How will you resolve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?
Ans- I will resolve canonicalization via using .htaccess file it happens several time that the home page of website have different urls like:

http://www.futuredigit.blogspot.com/, http://www.futuredigit.blogspot.com/index/html, http://futuredigit.blogspot.com/,  https://www.futuredigit.blogspot.com/, http://www.futuredigit.blogspot.com/index,

May be  search engines treat these url as different urls and the work effort done by us will be distribute in these 3 and it will appear as duplicate website in search engines to resolve these type of issues we must should .htaccess file and redirect to all urls to single domain.

Q158- How will you inform Google that a particular page contains Adult content?
Ans- It’s easy we can inform Google about the adult content via using following meta

<meta name=”rating” content=”adult” />
OR
<meta name=”rating” content=”RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA” />

Q159- What are your favorite social media tools ? Which tools do you prefer to use to incease user engagement?

Ans- At the present time I am using Twitterfeed and Twuffer more than any other tools.  I try to respond to most people who say something to me, either on my blogs or on Twitter.  I ignore Facebook as much as possible but once in a while I respond to someone there, too.

Two things improve engagement in my experience: treating people with respect and publishing something where they feel compelled to discuss it with you.  Writing from the heart rather than from keyword research works better if you’re trying to get people to stop lurking and say something.

Q160- What are top SEO ranking factors according to you?
Ans- It depends on several points like quality content on web page, social  sharing, anchor text used in backlink, number & quality of inbound links, domain authority, page CTR, bounce rate & average time spent by user on the page etc.

Q161- You want that some of your keywords found on search engines but these keywords are related to your content and can only found in images on the page. How will you promote these keywords?
Ans- It’s not so difficult because the content for website related to keyword as said these keywords can be found in images. So, I will use these keywords in image via “alt image tag” and submit it to some image promotion sites.

Q162- All major search engines are case sensitive Yes or No?
Ans- Not any major search engine is case sensitive so far.

Q163- Did you know what is the difference between targeted page & landing page?
Ans- Page which we have targeted to rank that page known as targeted page and the page which has ranked called landing page.

Q164- You have just launched a new web site. Unfortunately, nobody visits it, even search engines’ spiders don’t notice it. What can you do for its SEO success?
Ans- It happens with new sites some time if I am in such situation I will submit the url to search engines directly or submit in search engines directories.

Q165- What is the difference between exit rate and bounce rate?
Ans- We all are familiar with bounce rate which indicate the percentage of people who leave a particular website just after viewing a single page on this & exit rate indicate the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page.

Q166- As a point of view of SEO which link is better Text Link or Graphic Link?
Ans- Text link is far better than graphic link.

Q167- What is Google EMD updates?
Ans- EMD update its’ for “Exact Match Domain” and it was launched in September 2012. As few website rank on top of the search engines just because there name include that keywords and they don’t have quality content anything which helpful for users. So this search engines devalue such type of sites and start giving weight age to high quality and authority sites. Few website maintain their pages updated content and regain the position but most of the website is worthless now days.

Q168- These days I can see that many well established blogs and websites losing their rankings? Why this is happening. Is SEO dead ?

Ans- Search engine optimization should never have been tied to rankings. We should always have been measuring SEO value in terms of search referral traffic.

SEO should not be treated as a production process that can be followed according to a formula.  You have to treat each Website differently. The Websites that run into trouble with the search engines are following formulas for success. Ultimately that leads to failure.

Q169- Is there any benefit of doing SEO on copied content, as some experts are ranking copied content high on SERP?

Ans- That is a long, complicated topic.  The short answer is, yes, you should optimize duplicate or copied content.  But the longer answer requires that you explain what it means to “optimize” such content for search. Today we devote more effort to canonicalization because the search engines demand it; hence, the optimization process for duplicate content is not so much about how to bring in more traffic for it but how to use it to channel value into source content.

On the black hat side there are things you can do with duplicate content that leverage some of the gimmicks black hats favor.  Is that “optimization”?  I guess opinions will vary, but if you’re getting the best search performance value out of the copied content that you can, then that is optimal performance is it not?