All SEO Interview Questions and Answers

What is search intent?

It is what the person really wants. Match your page type with the intent of the keyword, otherwise it will not rank, even with good content.

See Search Intent.

What is keyword cannibalization?

The search engine may not know which page to rank, so it can switch between them, and none of them gets a strong position.

• Find it: search site:yourdomain.com "keyword", or check in Search Console which pages get impressions for one query.
• Fix it: merge the pages into one stronger page and 301 redirect the others, or change the focus of one page, or use clear internal links to the main page.

What is an orphan page?

Orphan pages are in your site (maybe in the sitemap) but no other page links to them. Crawlers find pages by links, so orphan pages are hard to discover and get no internal link value.

1. Compare the list of URLs from your sitemap with a crawl of your site.
2. Pages in the sitemap but not found by the crawl are orphan pages.
3. Add internal links from related pages, or delete or merge the pages which are not needed.

See Internal Linking.

What is a Google core update and how should you react?

Google makes several broad changes every year and announces them as core updates. They improve how Google judges content as a whole, and they are not a punishment for one site.

1. Wait until the update has finished rolling out (Google tells on its status page).
2. Compare your Search Console data before and after, by page and by query.
3. Read Google’s guidance on helpful content, and compare your pages with the ones that now rank better.
4. Improve the real quality: depth, originality, trust, user experience. Do not make random quick changes.

Recovery can take a few months, and often it comes with the next update.

How does Google handle JavaScript websites and what is JavaScript SEO?

Googlebot crawls the HTML, then queues the page for rendering with a recent version of Chrome, and then indexes the result. This second step can be delayed.

• Put important text, titles, canonical tags and links in the HTML sent by the server when possible (server side rendering or static generation).
• Use normal <a href> links, not only click events.
• Do not block JS and CSS files in robots.txt.
• Check the rendered HTML with the URL Inspection tool (View tested page).

How do you do a website migration without losing SEO?

1. Crawl the old site and save the list of all URLs, titles and top traffic pages.
2. Map every old URL to the best new URL.
3. Build and test the new site on a staging server that is blocked from search (use a password, not only robots.txt).
4. Keep the content, titles, headings and internal links of important pages as close as possible.
5. Set 301 redirects from old URLs to the new URLs, with no chains.
6. Update canonical tags, the sitemap and internal links to the new URLs. For a domain change use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.
7. After launch, check Search Console for errors and compare traffic for some weeks.

See Redirection.

What is the Google disavow tool and when should you use it?

You upload a text file with the links or domains you want Google to ignore. Google says its systems already ignore most spam links, so for most sites it is not needed.

# links to ignore
domain:spam-example.com
https://bad-site.example/page.html

Use it only if you have a manual action for unnatural links or a large number of paid or spam links that you cannot get removed. A wrong disavow file can hurt, so be careful. See Backlinks.

What is link building and is buying links allowed?

Link building means getting other websites to link to yours, by creating useful content and doing outreach, guest posts, digital PR and partnerships.

Buying or selling links that pass ranking signals is a violation of Google’s spam policies (link spam). Paid or affiliate links must be marked with rel="sponsored" or nofollow. See Backlinks.