SEO Advanced Diagnostics & Troubleshooting 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A site's organic traffic drops sharply on the same day a Google core algorithm update rolls out. What is the FIRST diagnostic step?
- Submit a reconsideration request immediately
- Compare the site's content quality and E-E-A-T signals against top-ranking competitors (Correct answer)
- Disavow all backlinks acquired in the past year
- Switch to HTTPS if not already done
Correct answer: Compare the site's content quality and E-E-A-T signals against top-ranking competitors
Core updates typically reward or demote sites based on overall quality and E-E-A-T, so benchmarking against winners is the proper starting point.
Question 2: Google Search Console shows a page is 'Discovered – currently not indexed.' What is the most likely cause?
- The page has a noindex meta tag
- Googlebot discovered the URL but has not yet crawled it due to crawl budget constraints (Correct answer)
- The page returns a 404 status code
- The page is blocked in robots.txt
Correct answer: Googlebot discovered the URL but has not yet crawled it due to crawl budget constraints
The 'Discovered – currently not indexed' status means Google found the URL but hasn't crawled it yet, often due to limited crawl budget or low perceived priority.
Question 3: An e-commerce site has thousands of faceted navigation URLs being crawled and indexed. Which solution best preserves link equity while preventing duplicate content?
- Block all faceted URLs in robots.txt
- Add noindex to all faceted URLs and use canonical tags pointing to the category page (Correct answer)
- Use 301 redirects from faceted URLs to the main category page
- Implement hreflang tags on all faceted pages
Correct answer: Add noindex to all faceted URLs and use canonical tags pointing to the category page
Noindex with canonicals prevents indexing of duplicate faceted pages while allowing Googlebot to crawl and pass signals to the canonical category page.
Question 4: A site migrates from HTTP to HTTPS but organic traffic drops 30% post-migration. Which issue is MOST likely responsible?
- HTTPS pages load slower than HTTP pages
- Internal links and canonicals still reference HTTP URLs, creating split signals (Correct answer)
- Google penalizes sites that switch protocols
- The SSL certificate is using SHA-1 encryption
Correct answer: Internal links and canonicals still reference HTTP URLs, creating split signals
Failing to update internal links and canonical tags to HTTPS splits link equity and can confuse Googlebot about the canonical version of pages.
Question 5: A technical SEO audit reveals that a large percentage of pages return a 200 status code but have empty body content. What should you investigate first?
- Server-side rendering failures or JavaScript rendering errors that prevent content from loading (Correct answer)
- Missing XML sitemap entries for those pages
- Absence of a robots.txt file
- Lack of structured data on those pages
Correct answer: Server-side rendering failures or JavaScript rendering errors that prevent content from loading
Soft 404s with empty bodies are commonly caused by JavaScript rendering errors or SSR failures that return a 200 even when content is missing.
Question 6: Log file analysis shows Googlebot crawling the same set of low-value pages repeatedly while ignoring new content. What is the best corrective action?
- Add all new pages to Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool one by one
- Improve internal linking to new pages and reduce crawlable low-value URLs via noindex or robots.txt (Correct answer)
- Submit a new XML sitemap every day
- Increase server response speed to allow faster crawling
Correct answer: Improve internal linking to new pages and reduce crawlable low-value URLs via noindex or robots.txt
Redirecting crawl budget to high-value new content requires both stronger internal linking signals and reducing crawlable low-value page inventory.
Question 7: After a site redesign, Google Search Console reports a spike in 'Page with redirect' coverage issues. What does this indicate?
- Pages are returning 301 redirects and GSC is reporting them as not indexed because redirects are excluded from the index (Correct answer)
- The sitemap is missing
- All pages are now blocked by robots.txt
- The site has been hit by a manual penalty
Correct answer: Pages are returning 301 redirects and GSC is reporting them as not indexed because redirects are excluded from the index
GSC flags redirect URLs submitted in sitemaps as 'Page with redirect' because sitemaps should contain final destination URLs, not redirect chains.
SEO Advanced Diagnostics & Troubleshooting 2
A site's organic traffic drops sharply on the same day a Google core algorithm update rolls out.
What is the FIRST diagnostic step?