SEO Technical SEO 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What does a 301 HTTP status code indicate to search engines?
- The page is temporarily unavailable
- The resource has permanently moved to a new URL (Correct answer)
- The page requires authentication
- The server encountered an internal error
Correct answer: The resource has permanently moved to a new URL
A 301 redirect signals a permanent move, transferring most link equity to the new URL.
Question 2: Which structured data format is recommended by Google for implementing Schema.org markup?
- Microdata
- RDFa
- JSON-LD (Correct answer)
- HTML5 microformats
Correct answer: JSON-LD
Google recommends JSON-LD because it is easy to implement and keeps markup separate from HTML content.
Question 3: What is the purpose of the 'rel=canonical' tag?
- To block a page from being crawled
- To tell search engines the preferred version of a duplicate page (Correct answer)
- To set the language of a page
- To define the page's character encoding
Correct answer: To tell search engines the preferred version of a duplicate page
The canonical tag consolidates ranking signals to the preferred URL when duplicate or near-duplicate content exists.
Question 4: Which Core Web Vital metric measures visual stability of a page?
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) (Correct answer)
- Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Correct answer: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures the sum of unexpected layout shifts during the page's lifetime, with a good score being below 0.1.
Question 5: What does an XML sitemap primarily help search engines do?
- Understand page content semantics
- Discover and prioritize URLs for crawling (Correct answer)
- Determine page load speed
- Block sensitive pages from indexing
Correct answer: Discover and prioritize URLs for crawling
XML sitemaps list URLs and optional metadata to help crawlers efficiently find and prioritize pages.
Question 6: A site uses HTTPS but some page resources (images, scripts) load over HTTP. What is this called?
- Protocol mismatch
- Mixed content (Correct answer)
- Insecure redirect
- HTTP downgrade
Correct answer: Mixed content
Mixed content occurs when a secure HTTPS page loads sub-resources over HTTP, which browsers warn about and may block.
Question 7: What is 'crawl budget' in the context of technical SEO?
- The cost of running a web crawler
- The number of pages Googlebot crawls on a site within a given timeframe (Correct answer)
- The maximum file size Googlebot will index
- The time Google spends rendering JavaScript
Correct answer: The number of pages Googlebot crawls on a site within a given timeframe
Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes in a given time period, influenced by site authority and crawl demand.
SEO Technical SEO 2
What does a 301 HTTP status code indicate to search engines?