General SEO MCQs

1. For maximum potential visitor traffic, if you could choose just ONE search engine to optimize your Web site for, which should it be?

2. Google can index the information inside of an iFrame

3. What is Keyword Stuffing?

4. Which strategies produces the most valuable links for SEO?

5. Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines.

6. What is a 404 page?

7. Which factors influence ranking?

8. What does SEO mean?

9. Is SEO a one-time event?

10. Social media has no effect on SEO.

11. How long does it take to rank #1 with Google

12. Which will get your web site banned from Google?

13. Which is a SEO best practice?

14. _______ is the name for the Google search filter designed to penalize over-SEO'd sites.

15. What are the 'best practice(s)' for the TITLE tags on your web pages?

16. What is a White Hat SEO?

17. Does Google use social metrics to influence search rankings?

18. Why should your URLs be words that make sense and not coded strings of characters?

19. SEO skills are only used for Google.

20. How do you submit an XML sitemap to Google?

21. Which URLs would be the best choice of structure for both the search engines and humans?

22. What should you avoid when writing a description META tag?

23. If you find that people are accessing the same content through muliple URLs,

24. Which blackhat Seo techniques is characterized by a method to decieve search engine, by detecting the search engine bot and “feeding” it with a different HTML code than the HTML actually served to users?

25. Which is a best practice for creating URL names?

26. Which is more likely to have a positive impact on a page's search engine rankings?

27. What does the acronym 'XML' stand for?

28. Which sign is used in meta keywords after completing one keyword?

29. Only Keywords are part of SEO.

30. What is the meaning of the term 'H1' tag?

31. What should you always do if you use images for your navigation buttons?

32. Why is the 'alt' attribute important for SEO?

33. Why are meta tags important in relation to SEO?

34. How many H1 titles is considered optimal on a webpage?

35. Which relate to off page SEO?

36. SERP stands for

37. Which of these categories of tools would NOT be used by someone for ethical SEO?

38. What will cause a 404 page to display?

39. Which is NOT a type of conversion trackable in Google Analytics?

40. Google's Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird search algorithm updates are a move by Google to

41. The definition of 'thin' content is...

42. When permanently moving content from one webpage to another, you should...

43. What should you do when designing the links on your site to improve a robot's ability to search and index your site?

44. What does Google use in a listing to describe your web site?

45. Writing content for SEO must be repeated at least 20 times on your website for ranking.

46. A breadcrumb:

47. What does the Google Analytics program do?

48. Which is not a critical element to ranking well in Google Local/Maps/Places search?

49. SEO depends only on keywords for ranking.

50. A backlink is....

51. What are the most popular search engines in China and Russia respectively?

52. Which form of redirect/meta tag will transfer the most authority to the directed page?

53. What type of redirect gives you the most credit in terms of SEO?

54. Which program lets Google know if you are using an XML Site Map?

55. SEO techniques offer a guaranteed method of appearing as the first listing on an unpaid search engine listing

56. What does EMD mean?

57. how many H1 tags are recommended per page

58. How can you communicate additional information about an image to a bot?

59. A site map is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and is only intended for human visitors.

60. Which activity is NOT considered to be a page optimization method?

61. How many User-Agent: lines can be included in a single entry in a robots.txt file?

62. Which of these do NOT affect your personal Google search results when you are logged in to a Google account

63. In reference to copywriting, what are Calls to Action?

64. What does Google use to 'name' your web page in its search listing?

65. URL's with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. With that, you should:

66. What is cloaking?

67. What do the acronyms PA, DA, and PR stand for?

68. If you have just made a web site live, what is the easiest way to see if it has been indexed by Google?

69. What do you enter in the robots.txt file to block a specific .html page on your site?

70. How do you eliminate duplicate content from being indexed by Google?

71. What do you enter in a robots.txt file single entry to apply the rule to all bots?

72. In the robots.txt file, what does the 'Disallow:' line do?

73. What do you enter in a robots.txt file to block a specific directory and everything in it?

74. Which statement is true regarding natural vs. artificial inbound links?

75. From a purely ranking perspective, the value of an incoming link is not affected by the number of outgoing links on the same Web page.

76. What do you enter in a robots.txt file to prevent the crawling of an entire site?

77. What would happen if you searched Google for site:example.com “some text here”

78. In the robots.txt file, what does the 'User-Agent:' section do?

79. What directive would you enter in the robots.txt file to make a rule that affects all directories beginning with the word 'page'?

80. How do you control where robots go and what they do in your web site?

81. Why would you obtain an SSL certificate for SEO purposes?

82. What does the acronym FFA stand for?

83. How long will it take before Google will Index your website?

84. What are 'doorway' pages?

85. Applying structured data provides what SEO benefit to an e-commerce site?

86. Which is the most accurate definition of search engine spam?

87. What do you enter in the robots.txt file to remove all images on your site from Google Images?

88. What robot do you apply a rule to in the robots.txt file in order to block images from Google Images?

89. Google did the 'caffeine' roll-out to:

90. How should text links within larger bodies of text be formatted for ease of use?

91. Which of the following best describes Query Strings?

92. What is the Cloaking SEO technique?

93. Link building offers all of these advantages EXCEPT ________.

94. Which is in the right order? (The first tool that you use to the last tool that you use)

95. What is usually the best webpage to get linked to while receiving a themed inbound link from another website?

96. What is Keyword Density?

97. The process of acquiring links from other websites to your own is known as:

98. Does Google prioritize themed inbound links?

99. A Hallway Page is used to:

100. Which website design guidelines have been recommended by Google?

101. Which can you do in the Google search box (Omnibox)?

102. Which statement about search engine optimization techniques is/ are correct?

103. Which statement regarding website content is correct?

104. What authorizes payments for e-businesses and online retailers?

105. Which activities could be looked upon by Google as per their quality guidelines?

106. Which statement about Google's technical and quality guidelines is true?

107. What is the function of 'indexer' part of the Google search engine?

108. Which statement is NOT true?

109. Which factor has an impact on the Google PageRank?

110. What do you use to search for exact phrases in Google?

111. Which does Google uses to display the characters of a web page's Title Tag?

112. Which search engines or directories provides the directory search results for Yahoo?

113. Which statement about the Google Sitemap are correct:

114. Are RSS/Atom feeds returned in Google's search results?

115. What does the term Keyword Prominence refer to?

116. Which factors does Google take into account while assessing whether or not a website is an authority website?

117. What is Anchor Text?

118. If you search for the term 'iq test' in the Word Tracker keyword suggestion tool, will it return the number of independent searches for the term 'iq'?

119. What is the illegal act of copying of a page by unauthorized parties in order to filter off traffic to another site called?

120. Do search engines such as Google detect unnatural linking patterns by checking the Class C IP address of the page where the link to the website originates?

121. While grading your website, Google gives credit to outbound links pointing to authority websites?

122. Which URLs can the Google search engine spider?

123. What does the 302 server response code signify?

124. Which statement is correct with regard to the description meta tag?

125. Which statement is correct with regard to the images within a webpage?

126. Which facts about Alexa are correct?

127. Which facts about Alexa are correct?

128. Google looks down upon paid links for enhancing page rank. If a website sells links, what action/s does Google recommend to avoid being penalized?

129. Which action could get you banned by Google?

130. Which statement about Google's technical and quality guidelines is true?

131. Which is an ethical SEO Technique?

132. All major search engines are case sensitive.

133. While optimizing your website it is important to generate the right type of traffic, how does the Bounce Rate information help in this regard?

134. Which factors contribute towards link popularity of a website?

135. Search engines do not index some common words (such as 'or', 'and', 'when', and 'in') within the webpage. What are these common words called?

136. Which activities could be looked down upon by Google as per their quality guidelines?

137. _____ is usually the best web page to get linked to while receiving a themed in-bound link from another website

138. Which can be termed as good keyword selection and placement strategies?

139. If your site is not appearing in Google search results because of some unethical SEO practices in the recent past, _________________.

140. Which statements about search engine optimization techniques are correct:

141. A Hallway Page is used to:

142. Which free tools/websites could help you identify which city in the world has the largest search for the keyword - 'six sigma'?

143. How are site maps important for the search engine optimization process?

144. What is the function of 'indexer' part of the Google search engine?

145. Which conditions will Google treat favorably from the 'Relevancy' perspective?

146. Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meanings to Yahoo. What is performed by the link: operator?

147. Which factor has an impact on the Google PageRank?

148. Why is it a bad idea from the seo perspective to host free articles and write ups that are very common on the internet.

149. The following robots meta tag directs the search engine bots: META NAME='robots' CONTENT='noindex,nofollow'

150. _________________ use both crawlers and directories to generate relevant results.

151. Which statement is correct with regard to natural links?

152. What will happen if you type the words 'Certification -Networking' in the Google search box?

153. Which statement about FFA pages are true?

154. What is the name of the search engine technology due to which a query for the word 'actor' will also show search results for related words such as actress, acting or act?

155. If a website's search engine saturation with respect to a particular search engine is 20%, what does it mean?

156. What is the main reason for the effectiveness of optimizing a webpage towards a long tail keyword search?

157. Google gives priority to themed inbound links.

158. Which black hat SEO technique is characterized by a method to deceive search engines, by detecting the search engine bot and 'feeding' it with a different HTML code than the HTML actually served to users?

159. Implementing a 301 Permanent Redirects on the old pages to redirect to the new pages is a good idea from the SEO perspective.

160. Which search engine technology prevents a website from appearing in numerous top positions in the search engine result pages?

161. The Yahoo Directory listing is a free service for commercial sites.

162. A Sitemap provides a list of internal links to user accessible pages on a website.

163. If you enter 'Help site:www.expertrating.com' in the Google search box, what will Google search for?

164. What robots.txt file do? User-agent:Googlebot Disallow:/*? User-agent:Scooter Disallow:

165. When Implementing System.EnterpriseServices.ServicedComponent derived classes, which of the following statements are true?

166. Which statement about RSS is correct?

167. Which correctly describes what are considered to be 'Doorway pages'?

168. What would be the impact of meta keywords on Google's ranking algorithm?

169. Which describe the practice of 'Google Bowling' from a negative SEO context?

170. Which HTTP headers tells search engines when content has been changed since the site was last crawled?

171. Which is not a valid goal type from the perspective of Google Analytics?

172. Which best describes a blog 'TrackBack'?

173. Which practices are allowable under Google Webmaster Guidelines?

174. Please choose which tool belongs to the Bing Search Engine?

175. Which rich snippet formats are supported by Google? Select all that apply.

176. Which is not a valid method for verifying site ownership on Google?

177. Which statement is true about Sitemaps?

178. Which HTML attributes can be used to provide descriptive text for site assets that a search engine crawler doesn't typically recognize?

179. Which practice may improve the Domain Authority rank of an automobile trading website? A: Submitting the website to all directories that are available. B: Getting backlinks from auto-niche blogs. C: Getting backlinks from fashion-niche blogs. D: Using Robots to post on forums. E: Manually posting at least 50 comments/day.

180. Which is an example of 'Cloaking', which is considered a 'black hat' SEO technique?

181. Which is the correct usage of the Keyword Planner Tool in order to get a Phrase Match search volume for 'New York hotels'?

182. Which statement is true about the effect of page load times to a page's ranking in Google's search results?

183. Which is true about Google's treatment of keyword density in a given page?

184. Which examples are considered by Google as 'auto-generated' content? Select all that apply.

185. Which is recommended actions to take when a website is penalized by an 'Unnatural links to your site' Manual Action from Google? Select all that apply.

186. Which image file types can be indexed by Google?

187. What should you use on Google search field to check if your web site is index?

188. The term 'scrapping' in search engine optimization can be described as

189. What is the size limit enforced by Google on robots.txt file?

190. What are the conditions that the robots.txt must have for it to work properly?

191. The best way for visitors having problems finding pages on your site is to visit your “XML sitemap”.

192. Which features are applied in Florida update?

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

194. What will happen if the title tag is too long on Google search result?

195. What bot does Google uses for web search?

196. Difference between 404 not found and soft 404 errors?

197. Where on your site is best to add the “nofollow” attribute?

198. hreflang attribute is used

199. Which image formats are supported by most browsers?

200. What tool does Google offer that allows you to run experiments to find what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors?

201. What will be the action if Google finds more than one canonical tag in your webpage?

202. Use of tag in XML sitemap?

203. What is the optimal HTTP status code to permanently remove a URL from Google's index?

204. Which statement is valid for LSI?

205. Which refers to Google’s Webmaster Tool?

206. The following are not part of Google’s Webmaster tool except for one. Choose your best answer?

207. Inserting numerous keywords aimed at search engines is the best practice to rank high on search result.

208. Which best describe as descriptive anchor text?

209. Which is not a crawler?

210. How can Meta Description tags help with the practice of search engine optimization?

211. Main role or responsibility of Canonical tag in SEO optimization.

212. Which is the best URL structure?

213. Which URL displayed on search result is best?

214. Which attributes on search results give the best summary of a landing page?

215. Best practice for description tag if your site has thousands of pages?

216. brandonsbaseballcards.com/folder1/1089257/x1/0000023a.htm is better than brandonsbaseballcards.com/articles/ten-rarest-baseball-cards.htm because?

217. What file should you create so that you can provide to bots with more information about the images found on your site?

218. Does Google always use description meta tags on the search result?

219. Where are the title tags displayed?

220. It is best to use single title tag across all of the landing pages.

221. Which should you avoid in anchor text for internal links?

222. Which is not the best practice in writing a headline tag?

223. Which description tag that accurately summarize the landing page.

224. If the title tag is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.

225. If your site has thousands of pages, it is best to use a single description meta tag across all of your site because it is the most feasible solution.

226. What are the limitations of title and description tags?

227. Which can be used to resolve canonical issue on a website?

228. What is the term for Optimization strategies that are in an unknown area of reputability/validity?

229. ________________ measures the distance between two keywords in the text.

230. What is Page Rank?

231. Best way to use for visitors having problems finding pages on your site?

232. Which offers quality content?

233. Which are not best practices for your web site about social media sites?

234. What is the generally accepted difference between SEO and SEM?

235. Which is true for ASO?

236. Which practices you need to avoid in reaching out users for your web site?

237. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (root page) as the right-most link, and list the more specific in the left most.

238. Which is a white hat SEO technique?

239. If you run a local business, where would you add your information to help you reach customers on Google Maps and web search?

240. Alt text are best when it is in?

241. ___________________ refers to how prominent your keywords are within key elements of your web page.

242. What attribute should you add to combat link spam and avoid reputation leak?

243. Which can be used to stop spamming of comments on a blog?

244. Best practices on writing better anchor text are?

245. Which is a Grey hat SEO technique?

246. Which is not an example of Engagement Metrics with relation to social media?

247. Which is not a valid statement for cross linking?

248. An XML sitemap can have maximum of

249. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Where is the root page (general page) of many breadcrumbs located?

250. Which factor improve a website authority?

251. __________________ identifies how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

252. Which is not an on page SEO technique?

253. Which is true for Astroturfing?

254. The following are not easy for visitors to navigate a website except for one.

255. Writing long anchor text, such as a sentence or paragraph is the best practice in anchor text.

256. Which is the correct formula of Keyword Density?

257. What term is commonly used to describe the shuffling of positions in search engine results in between major updates?

258. What is the procedure for the search engine to spider the user’s website?

259. 10 people do a web search. In response, they see links to a variety of web pages. Three of the 10 people choose one particular link. That link then has a ___ click through rate.

260. What will be the effect of this implementation in your website robots.txt file? User-agent:* Disallow:/

261. Which type of navigation is best in improving the accessibility of your website?

262. What are the tools used in organic search engine optimization?

263. It is an unethical practice that Google takes seriously which refers to an attempt to boost search result rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than to regular users.

264. What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?

265. Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?

266. What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?

267. Keyword stuffing is

268. Best practice in quality content except one.

269. Which is the best keyword research technique?

270. What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?

271. Which is the reasons why your web site doesn’t show up in the results of a Google mobile search even using the site:operator?

272. Which Google crawler should you allow access to your web site’s mobile version?

273. Sometimes robots.txt could still reference the URLs that you block, what is a better alternative against robots.txt?

274. What is the best practice to rank high on search results in content creation?

275. What is disavow tool?

276. What is better to show than a 404 error page over sitemap page every time a user can’t find a page on your site?

277. Having a custom 404 page is useful but which should you avoid?

278. It is better to show a 404 error page over sitemap page every time a user can’t find a page on your site.

279. Which is the best SEO method if you want to stop search engine from indexing a web page?

280. How would you make a text link useful to your visitors?

281. Till October, 2016, which was the latest Google algorithm update?

282. What is the best practice if you just created a mobile version of your website?

283. _____ refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines.

284. Which is the least important area in which to include your keyword(s)?

285. What will be the effect of the meta tag (rel='index, nofollow') on a webpage?

286. Which is the best practice for using a heading tag?

287. Which is not a White hat SEO technique?

288. Google analytics is a tool used for

289. What is PPC?

290. Which is part of Google's Webmaster tools?

291. How many disavow files are allowed for a website at a time?

292. What is sitemap.xml file?

293. Which is not the best practice in putting a HTML sitemap and XML sitemap on your site?

294. Which is false about X-Robots-Tag?

295. Which is/are not Google’s Webmaster tool services?

296. Which of the following can you do with Google Analytics?

297. What should be the ideal value of a Title tag of an HTML document?

298. What is the best practice to use when you are using images as links?

299. If over the time your website URL structure changes, which method will you use to not lose your website visitors?

300. What do you call the filename that tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site?

301. Which will not prevent content from appearing in search results?

302. What is the difference between exit rate and bounce rate? 

303. _________________ is the practice to sell a blog when it becomes famous and popular as well as driving a healthy amount of traffic.

304. What is keyword density and what is the formula for it?

305. What will be the effect of the entry in your website's robots.txt file? User-agent: googlebot Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: /

306. Which tools help webmasters to have better control of how Google interacts with their website and get useful information from Google about their site?

307. Creating a ___________ page instead of home page is considered unethical because these pages are aimed at misleading search engines.

308. What is the best link building strategy?

309. Which URL structure is considered to be the best?

310. Which HTTP server response code indicates a page that no longer exists? (Page Not Found)

311. The ____ is the most commonly used internet search type.

312. A(n) _____ is a search performed on google or any other search engine.

313. The most popular commercial search engines, google and bing, are based on ________ technology.

314. When developing a backlink strategy, what approach would be most beneficial?

315. What is a key reason the URL domain.com/apparel/jackets is preferable to the URL domain.com/p=141?

316. Which HTTP response status code would indicate a page has been moved permanently?

317. You notice a website is serving HTML to a Search Engine than to a human user. What is this an example of?

318. What would significantly improve Google's ability to a non-YouTube video in its Search Results?

319. Google primarily determines indexing and ranking by crawling which version of a page?

320. You want to identify which US state has the most search interest for a particular keyword. What tool would help you determine this?

321. Which results is most likely if you use an interstitial pop-up that requires a user to take action before you load the content of the page?

322. You notice a particular product in an e-commerce storefront is no longer indexed, despite no technical issues. What is a likely reason for this?

323. All bylone dates for articles are suddenly no longer visible on a website's listing within Google Search. Assuming no changes have been made to the site programming or content, what is the most likely cause?

324. Which approach is not advisable to Geo-targeting your website?

325. You have been asked to help a big e-commerce brand optimize their website for search engines. They currently have thousands of products listed on their website. What is your most appropriate first step?

326. What Does The Term "Sandbox" Mean In SEO?

327. Which Google search query should be used to return only PDF documents that reference Microsoft?

328. Which link is not crawlable?

329. All byline dates articles are suddenly no longer visible on a website's listing within Google Search. Assuming no changes have been made to the site programming or content, what is the most likely cause?

330. What is an example of a Google search result that can be found in position zero?

331. When creating accessible video content, what should you consider including?

332. You are optimizing a website that sells supplies for banking donuts. Which approach is most appropriate to drive more organic traffic?

333. Why is it important to be mindful of outbound follow links?

334. Which statement is true about JSON-LD?

335. What is a key reason why duplicate content might cause an issue with ranking?

336. What attribute would you use to describe the content of an image?

337. You are researching keywords for a client and creating list for an optimization plan. Which is not a recommended method of creating keyword lists?

338. You want to get a rough idea of how many searches per month a particular search term gets. Which tool do you use?

339. Changing the title tag and/or meta description will have a measurable impact on your _.

340. How do keywords change as people progress through the buying cycle?

341. Which technique is an example of black hat SEO?

342. A local accountant wants to start attracting more business directly from Google organic search. What is the best piece of advice to give to her?

344. _ analysis allows you to review requests made to your web server to identify insights such as how ofter a crawler arrives, what pages have 404 errors, and most crawled pages

345. Which page title references content that is evergreen

346. You load a page and start reading an article, and suddenly the content on the page moves. What metric is used to quantify this impact on user experience?

347. Which search query would be most difficult to determine search intent?

348. When you conduct a search, what are the bolded words within the search listing description?

349. Which acronym is used to describe the page a user sees after submitting a search?

350. Which statement is true regarding the use of social signals, such as LinkedIn shares, by Google in its ranking algorithm?

351. A user clicks an internal link resulting in this redirect chain: http://domain.com -> https://domain.com -> https://domain.com/. In this example, what is being consumed unnecessarily?

352. You are planning for the development of an e-commerce website. Which approach will be more beneficial for rankings?

353. What is the relationship of click depth to PageRank?

354. What is a popular technique for writing content with the goal of having it appear in a features snippet?

355. What is a common best practice for handling search result pages on a blog's built-in site search?

356. What might help a search engine understand the difference between an article on a dog bark versus tree bark?

357. A webpage has this tag: Brad's Bagels: How to Bake a Bagel. However, the Google search result for this page displays this title: _Brad's Bagels: Baking Bagels in the Oven_. What is a likely explanation?

358. What alt attribute should be assigned to an image of a decorative line being used to separate content

359. Your site serves identical content when you visit domain.com/page or domain.com/page?ref=123. What should you implement?

360. What data vocabulary is most commonly used when marking up content on a page?

361. According to Google, what type of content includes topics such as news, legal issues, financial advice, and medical information?

362. When would it be necessary to 301 redirect every page on a site?

363. What would contribute to a low bounce rate?

364. What should be as consistent as possible across the web when developing a local SEO strategy?

365. A user enters a search _ to retrieve results from a search engine?

366. The search query "How to make donuts without yeast" is an example of what?

367. What tool enables companies to display extra information within the natural search results without the need of any structured data?

368. Your client is ready to start a blog. but has read that they should put the blog on a subdomain instead of subdirectory in order to create more external links to their website. How would you advise your client about this strategy?

369. Blog author pages, each with only one sentence about the author, are at risk of being flagged as **

370. What is a common benefit to long-tail keywords?

371. Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines describe that experts should write content, especially YMYL content. This is one of the principles seen in the commonly used acronym__

372. What is the best way to provide a search engine with crawl instructions?

373. A search engine attempts to catalog every webpage by topic through the use of a ____.

374. Different search engines often differ in the _____.