Technical SEO FAQs

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. It involves making a website faster, easier to crawl and understandable for search engines.

Robots.txt is a file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of a website should not be crawled or indexed. It is crucial for technical SEO as it helps control the flow of search engine bots and prevents them from accessing sensitive or irrelevant content.

A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on a website, helping search engines understand its structure. It is important for technical SEO as it ensures that search engines can crawl and index all the relevant pages on a website.

A canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page.

A 404 error is an HTTP status code that means that the page you were trying to reach on a website couldn’t be found on their server.

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

Page speed is often confused with “site speed,” but it’s actually the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page. It matters because it’s a ranking factor and it significantly affects user experience.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Google-backed project designed to make fast mobile pages.

Structured data, also known as Schema markup, is a type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display your content.

The hreflang attribute (also referred to as rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”) tells Google which language you are using on a specific page.

Crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your site on any given day.

Log file analysis involves analyzing your server logs to see how search engine bots are interacting with your site.

The meta robots tag tells search engines what to follow and what not to follow. It’s a way to control how search engine spiders navigate your site.

A nofollow link is a type of link that tells search engines not to pass any link equity or “link juice” through the link.

Dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Giving us link juice and a backlink.

A disavow file is a tool that publishers can use to tell Google that they don’t want certain links from external sites to be considered as part of Google’s system of counting links to rank web sites.

A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms or manual review.

URL parameters are the parts of the URL that appear after the question mark (?). They are used to store user values.

Pagination in SEO refers to the concept of splitting up content into a series of pages.

Breadcrumbs in SEO are a type of secondary navigation scheme that reveals the user’s location in a website or web application.

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page.

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser.

A Google algorithm update is a change or series of changes to the way Google ranks websites in search results.

Broken links can negatively impact technical SEO as they create a poor user experience and hinder search engine crawlers from accessing and indexing your website’s content. Regularly check for broken links and fix them promptly.

Duplicate content can harm technical SEO as search engines may struggle to determine which version of the content to rank. It is important to avoid duplicate content issues by using canonical tags, implementing redirects, and ensuring unique and valuable content.

404 errors occur when a webpage is not found. They can negatively impact technical SEO as they create a poor user experience and waste crawl budget. Regularly monitor and fix 404 errors by implementing redirects or updating internal links.

it is a configuration file used by web servers, such as Apache, to control various aspects of a website. It is placed in the root directory of a website and contains directives that modify server behavior. Some common uses of the .htaccess file include setting up redirects, password protection, enabling or disabling certain features, and rewriting URLs. It is a powerful tool for website administrators to customize server settings without directly modifying the server configuration files.

Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot (sometimes also called a “spider”). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

Cross-linking involves linking between two sites, whether they are owned by the same person or not. It helps users navigate between different pages on the internet.

Crosslinking helps in improving the ranking of the websites in the search engine. It also helps in improving the visibility and usability of a website by providing direct access to it from other sites.

Body content relevance refers to how well the content of a webpage matches the search intent of a user. The more relevant the content, the better the page will rank in search engine results.

Keyword stemming is a technique used by search engines to analyze and understand the root word from search queries. For example, the stem of the words “jumps”, “jumping”, and “jumped” is “jump”.

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique where the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. This is done to deceive search engines and can lead to a website being banned.

The Google Sandbox is a hypothetical filter that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top results. It’s believed to hold back new websites until they prove their trustworthiness.

Black Hat SEO refers to aggressive SEO strategies, techniques, and tactics that focus only on search engines and not on a human audience, and usually do not obey search engines guidelines.

Some famous Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, using private link networks, and publishing duplicate content.

A ‘dofollow’ link passes authority (link juice) from the page giving the link to the page receiving the link. A ‘nofollow’ link, on the other hand, does not pass any authority.

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google to rank web pages in their search engine results. SERP, on the other hand, is the page that a search engine returns with the results of its search.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. In SEO, it’s used to identify patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.

You can check if a URL is indexed by Google by using the “site:” operator followed by the URL of the site. For example, “site:example.com”. If the site appears in the search results, it’s indexed.

Google Autocomplete is a feature in Google Search that suggests search terms as you type. It makes it faster to complete searches that you’re beginning to type.

A TLD, or top-level domain, is the last segment of a domain name, or the part that follows immediately after the “dot” symbol. Examples include .com, .org, .net.

A ccTLD is a country code top-level domain, such as .us for the United States, .uk for the United Kingdom, or .jp for Japan. These are often used by websites that want to target audiences in a specific country.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text.

An HTML sitemap is a page on your website that outlines the entire site structure. It helps both users and search engine bots to navigate the site.

Rich snippets are search listings that provide more information than the typical listing, such as a thumbnail image, star ratings, or other descriptive details. They can improve click-through rates and visibility on the SERP.