1. Tell me when do you apply for re inclusion in a search engine's index?
If our website is banned by the search engines for black hat practices and if we have corrected our wrong doings we apply for reinclusion.
2. Explain what is a Google "Penalty"?
Manual actions can be taken within Google webmaster tools if you've been penalized.
It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.
No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.
4. Tell me from SEO point of view, which is better - one big site or several smaller site?
If you have enough content in the same niche it is better to have it in one big site because first, this way the site is easier to maintain and the great number of pages is good for ranking high in search results. Many small sites allow focusing on specific niches, therefore competing for different keywords.
5. Tell me what do you know about Google's algorithm updates?
Google is always trying to work on their algorithm so that "more deserving" websites with better content rank higher than others. The three main algorithm updates of the last two years are Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird.
6. Can you please explain the difference between 'nofollow' and 'dofollow' link?
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.
7. Tell me what all verticals have you handled in your SEO career so far?
Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc.
8. Tell me is there a limit to robots.txt file?
Yes, googlebot reads the first 500 KB present in the robots.txt file.
9. Do you know what are webmaster tools?
Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.
10. Tell me will you use an ordinary html sitemap with Google?
Google has a special format for sitemaps rather than ordinary html format. So it is good to use special XML format that Google uses for sitemaps.
11. Tell me 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.
12. Do you know some online brand management tools?
Google Alerts, Technorati, Backtype, Yacktrack
13. Explain what is keyword stemming in SEO?
Keyword stemming 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.
14. Explain what is Keyword proximity?
It measures the distance between two keywords in the text. Keyword proximity is used by some search engines to measure relevancy of a given page to the search request. The idea is that the closer two keywords to each other are, the more relevant the page , keyword density measures how many times (not how far) a given keyword appears on a page.
They are the Webmaster, SEO Engineer and Website optimizer etc.
16. Tell me what is the latest update in SEO?
The latest updates in SEO are:
☛ Panda
☛ Penguin
17. Tell us what is Google Sandbox in SEO?
Google Sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time.
18. Do you know who is Matt Cutts?
He is the head of web spam team at Google.
19. Tell me what SEO tools do you use?
A carpenter can't build without a hammer. Every SEO needs their set of tools to get the job done. Popular SEO tools I use are BrightEdge, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics.
20. Tell me what are Webmaster tools?
Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.
21. Do you know what is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?
Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as "Pizza Box".
22. Explain what SEO tools do you use and why?
If someone says they don't use SEO tools, it's an automatic fail. Why? It means you're an incredibly inefficient person or that you have never done a significant amount of SEO work in your life. There's no way to do serious SEO without introducing some automation. For this question, I'm wondering what tools they use for keyword research, blogging, link analysis, social media, etc. The more obscure the better. And I'm not just looking for a list of tools, either - I want to know why you use them, what you love and what you find annoying. Sometimes I even learn about cool new tools this way! (Bonus for me whether I hire them or not, bwahaha.)
23. Do you know what is the main purpose of search engine spiders?
Index sites, because even though spiders visit sites, their main function is not only to visit them but to index their contents spiders do not monitor sites for unethical activities.
24. Tell me how do you optimize with social media?
See if they incorporate social media tools and tricks in their SEO endeavours, you want to get your name out there as much as possible and social media is the way to do it. Social signals to your pages are almost as good as back links. "Social shares - retweets, +1s and likes - are the SEO currency of the common internet user,"
25. Tell us what is 301 redirect?
It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url . It is a permanent redirect and it is also useful in directing link juice to new url from old url .
26. Do you know who is Rand Fishkin?
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.
27. Do you know what is Page Rank?
This is the Google technology for measuring popularity among users. Yahoo has a similar technology, called Web Rank, and Alexa Rank is the Alexa technology. The way Google measures how popular a given page is based on the number and quality of sites that link to it.
28. Explain what is the technical part of SEO?
If they don't understand simple HTML then they aren't the person you want to be working with, it's as simple as that. SEO experts also need to understand server side lingo like 301, 404, robots.txt, etc.
29. Tell me what do you mean by Cloaking?
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.
30. Tell me what do you understand by Google Dance?
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.
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.
32. Tell me 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.
33. Do you know what is keyword stemming?
The process of finding out the root word from the search query is referred as keywords stemming.
34. Tell me how will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?
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.
35. Explain what are the key aspects of Penguin update?
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.
