Experienced SEO Interview Questions

What is domain authority?

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100 made by the company Moz. Other tools have their own versions, like Domain Rating (Ahrefs) and Authority Score (Semrush). They estimate the strength of a site mostly from its backlinks.

Important: Google does not use these scores. They are useful to compare sites and to find link opportunities, but do not use them as a target by themselves.

What is E-E-A-T in SEO?

E-E-A-T is a framework in the Google quality rater guidelines. Raters use it to judge how reliable a page is. It is not a direct ranking factor or a score, but Google’s systems try to show content with these signs.

Show it with author bios, sources, clear About and Contact pages and honest reviews. See E-E-A-T and Helpful Content.

What are Core Web Vitals?

The values are checked on real users at the 75th percentile. Test with PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report of Search Console. See Page Speed and Core Web Vitals.

What is structured data and schema markup?

Schema markup labels the parts of a page, like an article, a product with price and rating, an organization or breadcrumbs. Google recommends the JSON-LD format.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Example Site",
  "url": "https://example.com/"
}
</script>

It can give rich results, but it does not directly raise rankings. FAQ and HowTo rich results are no longer shown by Google. Test with the Rich Results Test. See Structured Data.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget depends on how much your server can handle (crawl rate limit) and how much Google wants to crawl your pages (crawl demand). For most small and medium sites it is not a problem. For sites with many thousands of URLs, wasting it on duplicate or useless URLs can delay the crawling of important pages.

• Remove or block useless URL parameters and internal search pages.
• Fix redirect chains and server errors.
• Keep the sitemap clean, and improve the speed of the server.

What is duplicate content and how do you fix it?

It happens with www and non-www, http and https, URL parameters, printer pages, or copied text. Google usually picks one version and ignores the others, but it may choose the wrong one.

• Use a canonical tag to point to the main version.
• Use 301 redirects when the extra URL is not needed.
• Keep one URL for each page, and make internal links consistent.
• Write unique content, especially for product and location pages.

See Canonical URLs.

What is the difference between noindex and robots.txt disallow?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

If a page is blocked in robots.txt, Google cannot read the noindex tag, so it may stay in the index. To remove a page, allow crawling and add noindex.

What is mobile-first indexing?

Because most users search on phones, Google crawls and indexes pages with its smartphone bot first. If your mobile page has less content, fewer links or missing structured data compared to desktop, you can lose rankings.

• Use responsive design with the same content on all devices.
• Do not block CSS, JS or images for the mobile bot.
• Check pages with the URL Inspection tool.

See Mobile Friendly and HTTPS.

What is hreflang and when do you use it?

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/guide/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/guide/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/guide/">

Each version must list all versions including itself, and the links must be reciprocal. See International SEO and Hreflang.

What is the difference between a manual action and an algorithmic penalty?

See Black Hat SEO.

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.