SEO Preventive Maintenance Procedures 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which HTTP status code indicates a permanent redirect that passes link equity and should replace 302 redirects for SEO purposes?
- 200 OK
- 301 Moved Permanently (Correct answer)
- 302 Found
- 410 Gone
Correct answer: 301 Moved Permanently
A 301 redirect signals a permanent move and passes the majority of link equity to the destination URL, unlike the temporary 302.
Question 2: During a routine SEO audit, you discover pages returning 404 errors that previously had backlinks. What is the recommended preventive fix?
- Delete the pages from Search Console
- Implement 301 redirects to relevant live pages (Correct answer)
- Add noindex tags to the error pages
- Submit a disavow file for those URLs
Correct answer: Implement 301 redirects to relevant live pages
Implementing 301 redirects from dead URLs to relevant live pages recovers lost link equity and improves user experience.
Question 3: What is the recommended frequency for running a full technical SEO crawl on a large e-commerce site with frequent product changes?
- Once a year
- Once a quarter
- Weekly or bi-weekly (Correct answer)
- Only after a site redesign
Correct answer: Weekly or bi-weekly
Large, frequently updated sites should be crawled weekly or bi-weekly to catch broken links, duplicate content, and indexation issues early.
Question 4: Which tool would you primarily use to monitor a site for unexpected drops in crawl coverage as part of ongoing maintenance?
- Google Keyword Planner
- Google Search Console Coverage Report (Correct answer)
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Analytics Audience Report
Correct answer: Google Search Console Coverage Report
The Coverage Report in Google Search Console shows indexed, excluded, and errored URLs, making it the primary tool for monitoring crawl health.
Question 5: A site's robots.txt file accidentally blocks the /product/ directory. Which immediate preventive action should an SEO specialist take?
- File a reconsideration request with Google
- Remove or correct the blocking directive and verify with Google's robots.txt tester (Correct answer)
- Submit all product URLs through manual URL inspection
- Add all product URLs to the sitemap only
Correct answer: Remove or correct the blocking directive and verify with Google's robots.txt tester
Correcting the robots.txt directive and validating it with Google's tester is the fastest way to restore crawlability for blocked pages.
Question 6: What preventive measure helps ensure that pagination on a blog does not dilute the ranking signals of core content pages?
- Adding noindex to all paginated pages
- Using rel='next' and rel='prev' annotations (Correct answer)
- Canonicalizing all paginated pages to page 1
- Blocking paginated URLs in robots.txt
Correct answer: Using rel='next' and rel='prev' annotations
rel='next' and rel='prev' help search engines understand the paginated sequence without consolidating all signals onto a single page.
Question 7: As part of scheduled SEO maintenance, which metric in Google Search Console most directly signals that Google is having difficulty rendering your JavaScript-heavy pages?
- Average click-through rate
- Core Web Vitals scores
- Crawled but not indexed status (Correct answer)
- Impressions in the Performance report
Correct answer: Crawled but not indexed status
'Crawled but not indexed' often indicates Googlebot crawled the URL but could not fully render or extract meaningful content, common with JS rendering issues.
SEO Preventive Maintenance Procedures 2
Which HTTP status code indicates a permanent redirect that passes link equity and should replace 302 redirects for SEO purposes?