Google 101
Backlinks
KW Research
Content Creation
Raters & Guidelines
100
Google Search Engine does 3 main things.. what are they?
Crawling, Indexing & Serving Ranked Results
100
What is PageRank?
An algorithm developed by Google to rank URLs by their importance.
It counts the quantity & quality of backlinks a URL received in order to determine how important the website is to a user's query
100
Name the 3 main metrics that SEOs should be looking at when doing organic KW research
KD%
Intent
Volume
100
What is a pillar page?
Pillar pages provide broad overviews of a topic
100
What is the Page Quality rating used for?
To determine how well the page achieves its purpose
200
What is the purpose of a sitemap?
Sitemaps tell Google which pages on your site are most important. This helps the search engine to find, crawl & index your sites content.
200
Name the 3 factors to calculating Authority Score
1. Link Power (quality + quantity of BLs)
2. Organic Traffic (average monthly traffic)
3. Spam Factors (indicators of manipulation or spam in the link profile)
200
Name 3 things we know about a popular Keyword like:
"guitar amp"
High-volume
Broad intent
Harder to rank
Favors visibility
200
What is a cluster page?
Pages that cover associated subtopics of the Pillar page
200
What is the Needs Met rating used for?
How useful a result is for a given search
300
What does a robots.txt file do?
Tells the bots which pages NOT to crawl
300
What was the purpose of Google's "Panda" algorithm update?
Released in 2011, It’s aim was to lower the rankings of websites with low-quality, thin content. This made it harder for sites to earn their way to the top of the SERPs through link building alone
300
Name 3 things we know about a "niche" Keyword like:
"cheap silvertone late 1980's guitar tube amp"
Low-volume
Specific intent
Easier to rank
Favors conversion
300
What kind of content would you want to incorporate a KW with transactional intent into?
KWs with transactional intent will most likely favor product pages & ecommerce sites in the SERPs
300
What does E-E-A-T stand for?
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
400
Describe "Crawl Budget Waste"
Google's resources being used on non-SEO pages.
The amount of time & resources Google spends on crawling a site is commonly referred to as "crawl budget", so you'll want to make sure that your top priority pages are being seen before other, non-SEO pages that might not be as important to prioritize.
400
What was the purpose of Google's "Penguin" algorithm update?
Released in 2012, It decreased the rankings of websites that violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines - specifically those who attempted to artificially increase the ranking of their webpages by manipulating the number of links pointing to them
400
True or False?
PPC is better for long term visibility
False. PPC is a great way to gain almost instant visibility, depending on how much money you're willing to spend & how long you want to run the ad for.
However, with SEO you can generate exponential long term visibility & traffic, but it is more time consuming.
400
If a person has a food blog, what could be an example of a Pillar page & Cluster pages they might have?
Pillar - 60 Best Chicken Recipes
Cluster - Chicken parm, Chicken florentine, Chicken tikka masala, etc..
400
What does YMYL stand for?
Your Money or Your Life
500
What is this code instructing the bot to do?:
<head>
<title>Our Team</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
</head>
This will prevent the bot from crawling the "Our Team" page.
500
Why should SEO's focus on building high-quality content that will help them attract links from other high-quality sites, rather than combing through their site to identify links from low-quality sites?
In most cases, Google will automatically ignore those for them.
Furthermore, Google still relies on PageRank as part of its core algorithm, so attracting new links from other high-quality sites is still beneficial.
500
When might a person choose to run a ppc ad for a keyword instead of trying to rank for it organically?
If the KW is organically not within reach yet, running an ad will allow them to more easily gain visibility on SERPs where they would otherwise be outranked organically
500
What are some key takeaways a content creator could gather from doing competitive research (by looking at SERPs or high-ranking competitors' sites)?
They can better understand what elements (kws, content structure, markup) & types of media (photo, video, internal/external links) to include in their own content to be competitive.
500
Since raters don't have a direct impact on rankings, what is their main purpose?
To evaluate whether Google's systems do in fact provide information that searchers find relevant and reliable as intended