Quiz Related To Unethical SEO Techniques

Question 1 How important are Meta Tags today?

a. Not important at all.

b. They have only minor importance, but it can be neglected.

c. Somehow important.

d. Very important, almost as much as keyword density.

e. They are the single most important SEO tool.

Explanation: The correct answer is c. Metatags are certainly not as important as keyword density but they still cannot be neglected completely.

Question 2 Which of the following techniques is unethical and can be a reason for banning?

a. Building backlinks.

b. Rewriting the titles to include the target keywords.

c. Creating a doorway page instead a home page.

d. Rewriting dynamic URLs into static.

Explanation: The correct answer is c. because doorway pages are aimed at misleading search engines, while all the rest (a., b. and d.) are normal SEO practices.

Question 3 How long is the period of keeping sites sandboxed?

a. 5 days.

b. 4 weeks.

c. 3 months.

d. 1 year.

e. Not defined.

Explanation: e. is correct because there is no upper and lower time frame for keeping sites sandboxed. While you cannot control the period of being sandboxed, you can take steps to minimize the damage of sandboxing.

Question 4 What is the function of the Robots.txt file?

a. It shows how the page will be seen by robots.

b. It prevents robots from spidering the site.

c. It tells robots to come to the site.

d. It provides instructions to robots which pages and directories not to index.

Explanation: Correct is d. because robots.txt neither displays pages, nor invites robots to come. Also, robots.txt is not mandatory for search engines and that is why it cannot prevent them from spidering the site.

Question 5  When do you apply for reinclusion in a search engine's index?

a. When you have made changes to your site.

b. When you have changed your hosting provider and the IP address of your site.

c. After you have been banned from the search engine for black hat practices and you have corrected your wrongdoings.

d. When you are not happy with your current ratings.

Explanation: Correct is c. In all other cases, submitting a reinclusion request is either unnecessary (as in a. and b.), or even harmful (as in d.) because it can be regarded as spam. On the other hand, if you have been banned for black hat practices, it makes no sense to submit the site for reinclusion, if you have not corrected what was wrong. More about reinclusion can be found in the Reinclusion in Google article.

Question 6 You have enough quality inbound links with the keywords in the anchor text but still you do not rank well in Google, even for your site name. What will you do? Check no more than 3 answers.

a. Try with variations of the anchor text.

b. Add more inbound links.

c. See if the targets on your site have not been damaged (i.e. renamed, or deleted, or moved) by mistake.

d. Check if you have more outbound than inbound links.

e. If inbound links don't help, add more keywords in other places.

Explanation: b. and e. are wrong. If you don't lack quality inbound links, adding some more will hardly help. It is true that quality backlinks are always valuable but since you have enough of them, then something else must be wrong. e. is also wrong because since you already have enough keywords in anchor text, where they weigh most, adding more keywords will hardly help much (unless you don't have a single keyword in other place, of course, but this is unlikely, if you are a good SEO expert) a., c, and d. are correct. a. is recommended by many experts as the solution, when you are stuck with lower ratings because the anchor text from different places to yours is suspiciously the same. c. is one of the trickiest to guess because when you perform a backlink check, you see that you have many backlinks but no hint that the target might not be in place. d. is correct because no matter that you have tons of quality inbound links, if you have many outbound links (or you are a link farm), this outweighs the inbound links.

Question 7 Which of the following linking practices can be considered as unethical cross-linking? Check all that apply.

a. Cross-linking between sites that are owned by the same company.

b. When there are many links between sites with the same IP.

c. The sites that link to each other have similar content, though there are minor differences in the text.

d. Creating many links and using the "rel=nofollow" tag around the link .

e. Each page on one site links to a page on the other site and the anchor text is the same.

Explanation: a. and d. are wrong. The fact that the owner of the linked sites is the same is not a reason that the linking is unethical. d. is one way to ask search engines not to follow a link. It is useful when you have many organic links to the same page, these links are necessary for human visitors and you want to avoid being labeled a link farm. b. If the sites have the same IP, this most likely means they are hosted on the same server and are related to each other, which is a hint of Black Hat SEO practices. c. This is an obvious example of a lazy Webmaster who has set up another site with the sole purpose of using it to link to the first one. e. looks very suspicious, though in some cases it could be the actual structure of a site. Generally, avoid using it because most likely this will get you into trouble.

Question 8 Google is gradually increasing the use of semantic analysis for determining search relevancy. Which of the following sentences about semantic analysis are true? Check all that apply.

a. Semantic analysis is a replacement of keywords.

b. Semantic analysis uses not only keywords but synonyms as well in order to determine relevancy.

c. If you have high keyword density (7-8% or more percent) but semantically the keywords measure very low (let's say, under 0.5%) you will not be listed in the top results.

d. If your site is semantically rich, backlinks become less important.

Explanation: a. and d. are wrong. Although Google has been using semantic analysis as part of its algorithm for many years, it has recently began to increase its weight in the algorithm for calculating relevancy and by no means keywords have become obsolete. Actually, semantic analysis relies on synonyms and words related to the search string in order to determine the relevance for a particular page and since a keyword is a direct match of the search string, it can't be neglected. d. is also wrong because currently semantic analysis is still not the primary way of determining relevancy, so backlinks still are very important. b. is correct – it is close to the definition of semantic analysis. c. is also correct because the lack of synonyms and related words generally suggests that the text is not written with humans in mind, but is aimed at search engines.

Question 9 If you have a site that is targeted at a particular country only, which of the following are recommendable to do in order to rank well in country specific search results? Check all that apply.

a. Use the appropriate language attribute in the HTML code of the page.

b. The site should be hosted in the same country, so that its IP falls in the range of IPs that are specific for this country.

c. Have the site written in the language of the country.

d. Submit the site to local search engines.

e. Use geotargeting.

Explanation: Only e. is wrong. Geotargeting is used mostly with advertisements. In can be done with sites as well but not for the purpose of ranking high with search engines. All the rest are correct, though none of them is mandatory. Additionally, search engines use their own algorithms to determine the language of a a particular sites, even there are SEO experts who say that no efforts on your side are necessary for ranking well in country specific search results, but this is hardly so. If you want to see how your site qualifies in terms of IP, here the a tool to check IPs and countries.

Question 10 You see that only 10% of the pages on your site are indexed by Google. What could be the reason? Check all that apply.

a. You have a robots.txt file and you have disallowed most of your site to be indexed.

b. You have many broken links.

c. Your keywords density is not good.

d. You are banned from Google.

e. You have many password protected sections.

Explanation: The correct answers are a., b., and e. If it was not your desire to exclude 90% of your site from being indexed, then you need to check if you have not made a mistake in listing the forbidden directories. Broken links cannot be followed and therefore, if the pages they lead to, are not accessible from an alternative link, there is no way for spiders to index these pages. The same applies to password protected pages – if the spider can't reach them, there is no way to index them. c. is wrong because keyword density is related to search relevance, not to site indexing. d. is also wrong because if you were banned from Google, your site wouldn't have been indexed at all.

To Know More About:  Google Penalty, Robots.txt and On Page SEO Tips