seo interview questions
Top seo frequently asked interview questions
It seems like there are a few different techniques out there, so I was hoping to get a "definitive" answer on this...
On a website, it's common practice to create a logo that links to the homepage. I want to do the same, while best optimizing for search engines, screen readers, IE 6+, and browsers who have disabled CSS and/or images.
Example One: Doesn't use an h1 tag. Not as good for SEO, right?
<div id="logo">
<a rel='nofollow' href="">
<img src="logo.png" alt="Stack Overflow" />
</a>
</div>
Example Two: Found this somewhere. The CSS seems a little hacky.
<h1 id="logo">
<a rel='nofollow' href="">Stack Overflow</a>
</h1>
/* css */
#logo {
padding: 70px 0 0 0;
overflow: hidden;
background-image: url("logo.png");
background-repeat: no-repeat;
height: 0px !important;
height /**/:70px;
}
Example Three: Same HTML, different approach using text-indent. This is the "Phark" approach to image replacement.
<h1 id="logo">
<a rel='nofollow' href="">Stack Overflow</a>
</h1>
/* css */
#logo {
background: transparent url("logo.png") no-repeat scroll 0% 0%;
width: 250px;
height: 70px;
text-indent: -3333px;
border: 0;
margin: 0;
}
#logo a {
display: block;
width: 280px; /* larger than actual image? */
height: 120px;
text-decoration: none;
border: 0;
}
Example Four: The Leahy-Langridge-Jefferies method. Displays when images and/or css is turned off.
<h1 id="logo" class="logo">
<a rel='nofollow' href="">Stack Overflow</a>
</h1>
/* css */
h1.logo {
margin-top: 15px; /* for this particular site, set this as you like */
position: relative; /* allows child element to be placed positioned wrt this one */
overflow:hidden; /* don’t let content leak beyond the header - not needed as height of anchor will cover whole header */
padding: 0; /* needed to counter the reset/default styles */
}
h1.logo a {
position: absolute; /* defaults to top:0, left:0 and so these can be left out */
height: 0; /* hiding text, prevent it peaking out */
width: 100%; /* 686px; fill the parent element */
background-position: left top;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
h1#logo {
height: 60px; /* height of replacement image */
}
h1#logo a {
padding-top: 60px; /* height of the replacement image */
background-image: url("logo.png"); /* the replacement image */
}
What method is the best for this sort of thing? Please provide html and css in your answer.
Source: (StackOverflow)
After a site redesign, I've got a couple of pages that need to be redirected. Everything is staying on the same domain, just a couple of things have been reorganised and/or renamed. They are of the form:
/contact.php
is now:
/contact-us.php
Using the .htaccess file, I've added this line, which is the one I find recommended most:
RedirectMatch 301 /contact.php /contact-us.php
This is mostly fine - it does the job - the problem is, it also redirects:
- /team1/contact.php
- /non-existant-folder/contact.php
Is there a way of specifying that I only want to redirect the contact.php in the root?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I am working on a ASP application and the code, template and files are organized in a way that does not allow me to alter anything outside the body tag. So I am thinking about inserting the meta tags inside the body -- like this:
<!-- FEW ASP INCLUDES -->
<html>
<head>
<!-- FALLBACK TITLE AND DESCRIPTION -->
<title>Default Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Default Description">
</head>
<body>
<!-- SOME HTML MARKUP -->
<div class="dynamic-content">
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="dynamic-content" -->
<!-- THIS IS WHERE I CAN WRITE ASP CODE -->
<title><%= Page.Meta.GetTitle( yada, yada ) %></title>
<meta name="description" content="<%= Page.Meta.GetDescription( yada, yada ) %>">
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
</div>
<!-- SOME MORE HTML MARKUP -->
</body>
</html>
I am wondering how good it is to put meta tags inside the body of an HTML document. How does it affect:
- search engines
- browsers
Source: (StackOverflow)
A website I've made has been recently hacked and Google indexed that hacked homepage and now its showing irrelevant text on search result.
The hack has been resolved but the search results haven't changed.
Is there a way to force Google to re-index my homepage?
Source: (StackOverflow)
The blog is basically a page that lists the summary of like 10 articles, each item title linking to the full article page.
I've seen:
Where do I use these?
Right now on the individual article page I have:
<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<h1 itemprop="name"> <a rel='nofollow' href="..."> A title... </a> </h1>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
bla bla
</div>
...
</article>
Which is ok I guess, but what do I do on the article index page? Do I add these to each article and add itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Blog" itemprop="blogPosts" to the container element of all articles? Because in the docs it doesn't appear that article is a child of blog...
Source: (StackOverflow)
What is the purpose of the rel="bookmark" attribute in <a> tags? For example:
<a rel='nofollow' href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask" rel="bookmark">Click Here</a>
Does it serve any SEO- or SEM-related purpose?
Source: (StackOverflow)
What is a good complete regular expression or some other process that would take the title:
How do you change a title to be part of the URL like Stack Overflow?
and turn it into
how-do-you-change-a-title-to-be-part-of-the-url-like-stack-overflow
that is used in the SEO-friendly URLs on Stack Overflow?
The development environment I am using is Ruby on Rails, but if there are some other platform-specific solutions (.NET, PHP, Django), I would love to see those too.
I am sure I (or another reader) will come across the same problem on a different platform down the line.
I am using custom routes, and I mainly want to know how to alter the string to all special characters are removed, it's all lowercase, and all whitespace is replaced.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I see two issues with AngularJS application regarding search engines and SEO:
1) What happens with custom tags? Do search engines ignore the whole content within those tags? i.e. suppose I have
<custom>
<h1>Hey, this title is important</h1>
</custom>
would <h1> be indexed despite being inside custom tags?
2) Is there a way to avoid search engines of indexing {{}} binds literally? i.e.
<h2>{{title}}</h2>
I know I could do something like
<h2 ng-bind="title"></h2>
but what if I want to actually let the crawler "see" the title? Is server-side rendering the only solution?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'd like to start using "SEO Friendly Urls" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text "ids" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to simply looking up by an integer. Now, I know this isn't as "human friendly", but if I switched from
http://mysite.com/products/details?id=1000
to
http://mysite.com/products/spacelysprokets/sproket/id
I could still use the ID alone to quickly lookup the details, but the URL itself contains keywords that will display in that detail. Is that friendly enough for Google? I hope so as it seems a much easier process than generating something at the end that is both unique and meaningful.
Thanks!
James
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm developing a new website and I'd like to make use of AJAX as much as possible. Basically, I want users to almost never navigate away from the homepage and have everything displaying in popup windows, sliders, sections etc.
Now our existing website already ranks pretty high so I also want to keep Google happy. I've been reading the Making AJAX Applications Crawlable by Google and understand that I have to provide the same content for the crawler via _escaped_fragment_.
The problem
I want to develop this website using Umbraco which already provides SEO-friendly URLs. i.e.
But the issue is that I don't have an easy way of implemeting _escaped_fragment_ without hacking the Umbraco core (at least that's my knowledge), and using the solution(answer) I have posted below will also keep users without Javascript happy. Win-Win situation? You tell me! =)
Update
There was an answer from another user yesterday (now deleted) who suggested that Google no longer uses the _escaped_fragment_ method and suggested this be left out. Is this true? Will Google actually run the AJAX to see the content?
Thanks
Marko
Source: (StackOverflow)
After reading Google's policy on making Ajax-generated content crawlable, along with many developers' blog posts and Stackoverflow Q&A threads on the subject, I'm left with the conclusion that there is no way to make a site with only JavaScript/Ajax-generated HTML crawlable. A site I'm currently working isn't getting a fair amount of its content indexed. All of the presentation layer for our non-indexed content is built in JavaScript by generating HTML from JSON returned from Ajax-based web service calls, and we believe Google is not indexing the content because of that. Is that correct?
The only solution seems to be to also have a "fall-back" version of the site for search engines (specifically Google) where all the HTML and content would be generated as it traditionally has been, on the server-side. For clients with JavaScript enabled, it seems that we could use essentially the same approach that we do now: using JavaScript to generate HTML from asynchronously loaded JSON.
Reading around, my understanding is that the current best practice for applying the DRY principle in creating crawlable Ajax-generated websites as described above is to use a templating engine that can use the same templates on the client-side and the server-side. For clients with JavaScript enabled, the client-side templating engine, for example mustache.js, would transform JSON data sent from the server into HTML as defined by its copy of a template file. And for search crawlers and clients with JavaScript disabled, the server-side implementation of the same templating engine, for example mustache.java, would similarly operate on its copy of the same exact template file to output HTML.
If that solution is correct, then how is this different than approaches used 4 or 5 years ago by front-end heavy sites, where sites essentially had to maintain two copies of the templating code, one copy for users with JavaScript enabled (nearly everyone) and another copy (e.g. in FreeMarker or Velocity) for search engines and browsers without JavaScript enabled (nearly noone)? It seems like there should be a better way.
Does this imply that two templating model layers would need to be maintained, one on the client-side and one on the server-side? How advisable is it to combine those client-side templates with a front-end MVC (MV/MVVC) framework like Backbone.js, Ember.js, or YUI App Library? How do these solutions affect maintenance costs? Would it be better to try doing this without introducing more frameworks -- a new templating engine and a front-end MVC framework -- into a development team's technology stack? Is there a way to do this less redundantly?
If that solution isn't correct, then is there something we're missing and could be doing better with our JavaScript to keep our existing asynchronous HTML-from-JSON structure and get it indexed, so we don’t need to introduce something new to the architecture stack? We really rather wouldn't have to update two versions of the presentation layer when the business needs change.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I understand there are a lot of questions that answer this. I'm familiar with .htaccess and nginx.conf methods, but I do not have access to such traditional configuration methods on heroku.
Simone Carletti gave this answer that leverages Rails 2.x Metals, but I'm using Rails 3 and this isn't compatible.
Redirect non-www requests to www urls in Rails
Please note:
I'm not looking for a simple before_filter in my ApplicationController. I'd like to accomplish a rewrite similar to Simone's. I believe this is job for the webserver or middleware like Rack at the very least, so I'd like to leave this bit out of the actual app code.
Goal
redirect to status
----------------------------------------------------
www.foo.com foo.com 301
www.foo.com/whatever foo.com/whatever 301
Only hosts matching /^www\./ should be redirect. All other requests should be ignored.
Source: (StackOverflow)
SEO-friendly URLs are all the rage these days. But do they actually have a meaningful impact on a page's ranking in Google and other search engines? If so, why? If not, why not?
(Note that I would absolutely agree that SEO-friendly URLs are nicer to use for human beings. My question is whether they actually make a difference to the ranking algorithms.)
Update: As it turns out, the Google post that endorphine points to here has caused tremendous confusion in the SEO community. For a sampling of the discussion, see here, here, and here. Part of the problem is that the Google post is addressing the worst case where URL rewriting is done poorly and so you'd be better off sticking with a dynamic URL rather than a mangled static "SEO-friendly" URL.
There's no question dynamic URLs can be crawled by Google and can achieve high rankings. Maybe it would be easier to reframe the question more concretely: given 2 otherwise equivalent pages, which will rank higher for the search "do seo friendly urls really affect page ranking"?
A) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/505793/do-seo-friendly-urls-really-affect-a-pages-ranking
or
B) http://stackoverflow.com?question=505793 (a fake URL for comparison only)
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have a webpage that I use h1 tags multiple times within various DIVs and I style h1 for each div to be the appropriate size.
For example...
#content h1 {
font-size:22px;
}
#left-nav h1 {
font-size:14px;
}
#content .recent-news h1 {
font-size:16px;
}
Is this alright? I am worried about SEO.
What is the best way to go about this? Or am I worrying about nothing?
Source: (StackOverflow)