Technical SEO Flashcards

Which robots.txt directive is used to block all crawlers from accessing the entire site?

Answer: User-agent: * Disallow: /

'Disallow: /' tells all robots not to crawl any page on the site.

What does the 'hreflang' attribute tell search engines?

Answer: The target language and region for alternate versions of a page

Hreflang specifies the language and optional geographic targeting of a page so search engines serve the correct version to users.

Which HTTP header can be used to set a canonical URL instead of an HTML tag?

Answer: Link: rel=canonical

The HTTP Link header with rel=canonical allows non-HTML files like PDFs to specify a canonical URL.

What is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) threshold for a 'Good' rating according to Google?

Answer: Under 2.5 seconds

Google considers an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less as 'Good,' measuring how quickly the largest visible content element loads.

What does Google's mobile-first indexing mean for website owners?

Answer: Google primarily uses the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking

With mobile-first indexing, Googlebot predominantly crawls and indexes the mobile version of a site's content.

What is a 'soft 404' error?

Answer: A page that returns a 200 OK status but displays a 'not found' message

Soft 404s return a 200 HTTP status while presenting 'not found' content, confusing crawlers that can't distinguish them from real pages.

Which tool can developers use to test how Googlebot renders a JavaScript-heavy page?

Answer: Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool

The URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console shows how Googlebot renders a page, including JavaScript-generated content.