Top Team Lead SEO Interview Questions & Answers:

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.

3. Suppose if the meta robots tag has a value of "no index, no follow" what does it mean? Does Google uses keyword tags?

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.