True or false? it is a best practice to make your urls as long and descriptive as possible.

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A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. To keep a web page out of Google, block indexing with noindex or password-protect the page.

If you use a CMS, such as Wix or Blogger, you might not need to (or be able to) edit your robots.txt file directly. Instead, your CMS might expose a search settings page or some other mechanism to tell search engines whether or not to crawl your page.

If you want to hide or unhide one of your pages from search engines, search for instructions about modifying your page visibility in search engines on your CMS (for example, search for "wix hide page from search engines").

What is a robots.txt file used for?

A robots.txt file is used primarily to manage crawler traffic to your site, and usually to keep a file off Google, depending on the file type:

robots.txt effect on different file types
Web page

You can use a robots.txt file for web pages (HTML, PDF, or other non-media formats that Google can read), to manage crawling traffic if you think your server will be overwhelmed by requests from Google's crawler, or to avoid crawling unimportant or similar pages on your site.

Warning: Don't use a robots.txt file as a means to hide your web pages from Google search results.

If other pages point to your page with descriptive text, Google could still index the URL without visiting the page. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or noindex.

If your web page is blocked with a robots.txt file, its URL can still appear in search results, but the search result will not have a description. Image files, video files, PDFs, and other non-HTML files will be excluded. If you see this search result for your page and want to fix it, remove the robots.txt entry blocking the page. If you want to hide the page completely from Search, use another method.

Media file

Use a robots.txt file to manage crawl traffic, and also to prevent image, video, and audio files from appearing in Google search results. This won't prevent other pages or users from linking to your image, video, or audio file.

Resource file You can use a robots.txt file to block resource files such as unimportant image, script, or style files, if you think that pages loaded without these resources will not be significantly affected by the loss. However, if the absence of these resources make the page harder for Google's crawler to understand the page, don't block them, or else Google won't do a good job of analyzing pages that depend on those resources.

Understand the limitations of a robots.txt file

Before you create or edit a robots.txt file, you should know the limits of this URL blocking method. Depending on your goals and situation, you might want to consider other mechanisms to ensure your URLs are not findable on the web.

  • robots.txt rules may not be supported by all search engines.
    The instructions in robots.txt files cannot enforce crawler behavior to your site; it's up to the crawler to obey them. While Googlebot and other respectable web crawlers obey the instructions in a robots.txt file, other crawlers might not. Therefore, if you want to keep information secure from web crawlers, it's better to use other blocking methods, such as password-protecting private files on your server.
  • Different crawlers interpret syntax differently.
    Although respectable web crawlers follow the rules in a robots.txt file, each crawler might interpret the rules differently. You should know the proper syntax for addressing different web crawlers as some might not understand certain instructions.
  • A page that's disallowed in robots.txt can still be indexed if linked to from other sites.
    While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by a robots.txt file, we might still find and index a disallowed URL if it is linked from other places on the web. As a result, the URL address and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the page can still appear in Google search results. To properly prevent your URL from appearing in Google search results, password-protect the files on your server, use the noindex meta tag or response header, or remove the page entirely.
Caution: Combining multiple crawling and indexing rules might cause some rules to counteract other rules. Learn how to combine crawling with indexing and serving rules.

If you decided that you need one, learn how to create a robots.txt file. Or if you already have one, learn how to update it.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2022-11-22 UTC.

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True or false? it is a best practice to make your urls as long and descriptive as possible.
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SEO Answers

Here's what you should know before taking this exam:There are 60 questions.The exam takes about 1 hour to complete.You must answer 45 questions correctly to pass.You must wait 12 hours between attempts.

You have 3 hours to complete the exam.

Some questions:


True or False? Authority directly impacts ranking strength.

True

False

True or False? Don't use a page's URL as your link description.

True

False

What do you need to balance when doing SEO?

Focusing on the user and making it easy for search engines to crawl your website

Creating lots of high quality content and personalizing it for your buyer personas

Adding more content to your website and focusing on your social media presence

Focusing on search engine crawlers and making it easy to share your content

Dr. Dave Driscoll, a very credible and well respected authority on dentistry, just linked to a blog post that you wrote about how to floss from his website. When Google assesses the authority of your post and recognizes the link from Dr. Driscoll's website, which search engine function is at play?

Crawling

Ranking

Discovering

Indexing

You’re trying to rank for one of your target topics using a web page that contains a long, canonical piece of written content. However, when you do your research on what’s already ranking for that topic by searching for it on Google, you notice that the majority of search results on page one are videos. Which of the following actions will give your website the best chance of ranking for this topic?

Do nothing. Because your web page is a lengthy piece of written content, Google will have more text to crawl – so eventually, it will rank your page above the video results.

Delete the written content, and replace it with a video version of that content on the same URL. Because Google is serving up mostly videos on page 1 for this particular topic, the written content doesn't have a place.

Create a video about that topic, and add it to your existing written page. Because Google is serving up mostly videos on page one for this particular topic, you’ll want to have a video in there – but that doesn’t mean having written content to supplement it won’t help.

What is the primary goal of a search engine?

To drive the most amount of traffic to their own pages

To serve users the most relevant content that matches their search query

To personalize search results for individual users

To index pages as fast as possible

True or False? The same SEO strategy will yield the same results for all websites.

True

False

Choose all that apply. Which of these factors will affect your SEO strategy?

How established your business is online

What resources you have to dedicate to SEO

How many followers you have on social media

What industry you're in

Choose all that apply. Which of these are important KPIs to consider for SEO?

Organic traffic

Keyword ranking

Bounce rate

Content length

Page load time

Choose all that apply. How do you determine the authority of a piece of content?

The content is optimized for search engines.

The content is talked about often.

The content is referred to often.

The content is cited in other works.

Choose all that apply. What does your backlink profile measure?

The number of outbound links from your website to other sites.

The number of inbound links to your website.

The number of unique domains that link to your website.

The quality of inbound links to your website.

True or False? You should optimize a single page for multiple keywords.

True

False

Choose all that apply. Why are internal links important for SEO?

They help users and search engine crawlers navigate your site.

They tell search engine crawlers which content should not be indexed.

They pass link authority from one page to another.

They allow your pages to appear in search engine results.

True or False? You should use hyphens, underscores, or spaces between the words in your URLs.

True

False

When should you use a robots.txt file?

When you have multiple versions of a page to indicate the preferred version

When your website receives a penalty from Google

When you have pages that you don't want search engines to crawl and index

Whenever you feel like it

Choose all that apply. Why is it important to have HTTPS for your website?

It encrypts sensitive data, like passwords and credit card numbers.

It's required by Google.

It increases users' trust in your website.

It prevents your site from receiving inadvertent penalties.

What is the purpose of a 301 redirect?

To temporarily redirect users from one URL to another

To prevent search engine crawlers from indexing a page

To resolve duplicate content issues

To permanently redirect users from one URL to another

Choose all that apply. Which of these are ways to increase your site speed?

Compress images

Upload images at the exact dimensions they'll be used

Add pages to your robots.txt file

Reduce the number of backlinks to your pages

What are the two biggest factors in the mobile user experience of your website?

Site speed and pop-ups

Responsive design and backlinks

Site speed and responsive design

Image compression and redirects

Which of these teams is NOT involved in the creation of a sitemap?

Marketing

Development

Sales

Legal

IT

True or False? The further away a page is from the homepage, the worse it is for that page's SEO.

True

False

Choose all that apply. When should you submit your sitemap to Google and other search engines?

When you first publish your website

When you publish a new web page

When you make a significant change to your site structure

When you redesign your website

The different types of keywords are:

Fat head, chunky middle, body keywords

Head terms, chunky middle, topic keywords

Head terms, body keywords, long-tail keywords

Body keywords, chunky middle, long-tail keywords

What stage of the buyer's journey is someone searching for "what is inbound marketing?" likely in?

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

None of the above

True or False? You should emulate the top-ranking content for your target keyword, but offer unique value.

True

False

Sam is the marketing director for StyleHub, a clothing boutique. They opened their brick and mortar store last year, but Sam only published the website a month ago and it isn't receiving much traffic yet. Now, they're ready to focus on SEO and have some resources to dedicate to it. Which three tactics should Sam focus on initially?

Creating a series of blog posts and pillar pages; Reaching out to journalists for backlinks; Running a keyword competitive analysis

Implementing structured data on the website; Optimizing the load time of the website; Guest blogging for other relevant, authoritative websites

Optimizing the website to follow on-page SEO best practices; Making the website mobile-responsive; Setting up a Google My Business profile

Which of these is an example of a long-tail keyword?

Glasses

Do I need glasses

Women's eye glasses

What does my glasses prescription mean

What was the purpose of the Google Hummingbird algorithm update?

Associating past search history with similar themes and pulling together keywords and phrases

Parsing out phrases rather than focusing on specific search queries

Targeting link spam and manipulative link-building practices

Serving up more personalized and relevant search results

What is a pillar page?

A structural strategy to organize the information architecture of your website

A page such as your home page which links out to a large number of other pages on your site

A way to organize a site's content pages using a cleaner and more deliberate site architecture

A website page that covers a specific topic in depth and is linked to a cluster of related content

Google measures how interesting other people think your content is through ___.

Links

Backlinks

Social shares

Page views

True or False? Google doesn't care about the quality of backlinks, only the quantity.

True

False

What kind of content is most likely to be organically linked to?

Informational content

Promotional content

Clickbait content

All content is equally likely to be linked to.

How many links does it take to rank high in search results?

The same number of links that other pages on your site have

More links than your highest-ranking page has

The same number of links that the results ranking on page one have

None of the above

True or False? All link-building tactics require building a relationship in order to work.

True

False

When building a relationship with the goal of receiving backlinks, what is the first thing you should do?

Request a link from them

Deliver value to them

Pitch an idea for a piece they can write

Tell them how important you are

Choose all that apply. What are the most important things to do when replying to press request alerts?

Respond quickly

Include an image or video

Give the journalist exactly the information they want

Make sure they know how authoritative your site is

True or False? Backlinks build authority.

True

False

True or False? The majority of SERPs include some type of rich results.

True

False

What are rich results?

Google's response to a user's search query

Visually enhanced search results that provide supplemental information to the title, URL, and meta description of a web page

A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content

A markup language

Jo is a marketer at Papier, a stationery company that does most of their business online. Jo has noticed that Papier is falling behind their competitors in search results and wants to improve their ranking and clickthrough rate. How should Jo go about optimizing the Papier website for this goal?

Add structured data to the product pages to display reviews and ratings data in rich results, and optimize the pages' meta descriptions.

Implement a topic cluster content strategy to create blog posts and a pillar page on the topic of stationery.

Submit their sitemap to Google Search Console and resolve any duplicate content issues and crawling errors.

What is Schema.org?

A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content

A website where you can input a type of structured data and generate completed markup for your page

The organization that creates the standardized language and rules used for structured data

Google's proprietary source of structured data

When should you decide to work with a developer to implement structured data on a page?

When there are multiple schema markups that you want to implement on a single page

When you are unable to use a plugin to add structured data to your website

You should always work with a developer to implement structured data.

When there are a large number of required or recommended properties in a markup

What tool can you use to test for errors in structured data markup?

Google's Structured Data Testing Tool

Google's Rich Results Test

Google's PageSpeed Insights

Both A & B

Why is over-optimizing bad?

You can't collect any impactful data to inform your next steps

Google will be confused and unable to crawl your site

You won't be able to update a page after a certain number of changes

It will trigger a penalty in Google

Choose all that apply. What data can you gather about your website from Google Search Console?

Search impressions

Position in SERPs

Time spent on a page

Clickthrough rate

If you track nothing else for SEO, make sure you track ___.

Organic traffic

Clickthrough rate

Conversion rate

Impressions

True or False? No matter what SEO tool you use, the metrics will be exactly the same.

True

False

True or False? Domain authority is a ranking factor in Google's algorithms.

True

False

Chris is a marketing manager at The Pet Box, which offers subscription boxes for pet owners. Chris wants to increase traffic to The Pet Box's main product page. Right now that page ranks on the second page of search results for their target keyword. Chris has started improving the on-page SEO of the page, optimizing it for their target keyword, and seeking backlinks from popular pet care blogs. In order to track progress towards their goal, which metrics should Chris track?

Organic traffic, position, impressions, backlinks

Organic traffic, clickthrough rate, bounce rate, sales

Organic traffic, bounce rate, time spent on page

Why would you want to run competitive analyses of keywords?

To figure out what keywords your web pages are currently ranking for

To determine whether you should be targeting a long tail keyword or a head term

To ensure the keywords you're targeting are aligned with your audience

You shouldn't run competitive analysis of keywords.

What is the recommended format for implementing schema markup?

Google Tag Manager

HTML

JSON-LD

None of the above

What kind of heading tag should you use for subtitles on a page?

H1

H2

H3

B or C

Which of these is a strategy to determine the internal linking structure of a website?

Pyramids

Schema

Canonicalization

Topic clusters

Choose all that apply. Which of these tactics will help improve your website's internal linking?

Add a related posts section to your blog.

Audit your robots.txt file.

Create more blog posts and web pages.

Create a pillar page and topic cluster.

Which of these is an example of a top-level domain?

www.

.org

https://

All of the above

True or False? It is a best practice to make your URLs as long and descriptive as possible.

True

False

What technical SEO issue can you solve with an SSL certificate?

Slow site speed

Lack of site security

Duplicate content

Negative mobile user experience

Zoe is a digital marketer at a graphic design agency, and she's been tasked this quarter with improving the firm's SEO. However, the only guidance she has received from her boss is to get the site to rank higher on Google. In order for Zoe to create a successful SEO strategy for the business, what should her first step be?

Perform an SEO audit of the firm's website to determine if there are any crawl errors or content gaps

Set a SMART goal and establish KPI's to track if her SEO efforts are successful

Outline a content calendar for the quarter, including target keywords with high search volume

True or False? When you make a change to a page, Google immediately crawls it.

True

False

True or False? Adding structured data to a page guarantees that it will appear as a rich snippet in search results.

True

False

True or False? Google accounts for the majority of searches worldwide.

True

False

What is a backlink profile?

A list of all the sites your website is currently linking to

A list of all the sites you are reaching out to for backlinks

A list of all the pages on your website that need backlinks

A list of all the sites currently linking to your site

What is the purpose of heading tags?

To provide a hierarchical structure to a web page

To entice readers to click through onto a page

To accurately describe a web page's contents

To tell search engine crawlers information about a page

When would it be beneficial to have a different title tag than your heading tag?

When your heading doesn't accurately describe the contents of the page

When your heading is too long and will get cut off in search engine results

When your title is more interesting than your heading

Never, the two elements should always be the same

Choose all that apply. Why are meta descriptions important?

They increase click-through rate and visits from organic search.

They increase visits from social media.

They increase the authority of a web page.

They give people the right information at the right time.

How do search engines use sitemaps?

Google uses a sitemap to locate structured data on a web page and display it in rich results.

Web crawlers use a sitemap to understand a website's structure so they can evaluate and rank it more easily.

Web crawlers use a sitemap to follow backlinks from one site to another and assign authority to those pages.

Search engines don't use sitemaps, but SEO experts use them to determine the information architecture of a website.

What kind of company would benefit from the site links rich snippet?

All companies can benefit from site links rich snippets.

A company with a large website, recognizable brand, and high search traffic.

A company with a smaller, highly targeted website.

A company that has an ecommerce store which sells products online.

True or False? Structured data is a markup language.

True

False

When performing keyword research, how can you determine which keywords you should create content for?

Define topics that you want your business to be known for, then find long-tail keywords within that topic area.

Perform a competitor analysis to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

Identify keywords that have the highest amount of search volume, then create as much content as you can on them.

A & B

How long should your page's title tag be?

Under 60 characters

Under 120 characters

Over 60 characters

As long as possible

How do you build discovery and relevance for search engines?

By increasing the number of backlinks to your pages

By driving as much traffic as possible to your website

By creating lots of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known for

By guest blogging on popular, authoritative sites

Which of these is NOT part of a URL?

Protocol

Domain

Path

Index

Why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO?

It can dilute your ranking potential.

It confuses users.

It can negatively affect your authority.

It isn't an issue at all.

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