The following list of technical SEO questions will help you prepare for any SEO interview – or just to test your technical SEO knowledge out of curiosity!
The list is in no way exhaustive and there may well be alternative answers to some of the questions. Please feel free to leave any of your favourite questions in the comments section below!
1. What does a nameserver do?
A nameserver connects the human memorable domain and hostname to the IP address (an example of a nameserver is the DNS, domain name system)
2. How to deal with duplicate content due to print versions?
Place a rel=canonical on the print pages back to the main article or if you are using parameters to serve up the print page, place a self-referential rel=canonical on the article page that will populate to any other page made from that page.
3. How to avoid duplicate content for mobile websites?
The preferred mobile solution is to have the same URL for desktop and mobile pages and to use browser identifiers with CSS adapted accordingly to the device.
Otherwise if that is not possible, you can keep two URLs but use a rel canonical, making sure the detection is done correctly so that the user is redirected to the correct version.
4. How to deal with duplicate content from URL parameters?
Simply set up a rel=canonical from the pages with parameters that refer back to the original page.
5. What is pagination?
Pagination is when an article or list of products has more than one page. Pagination issues can be solved by using the rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
6. What does XML stand for?
eXtensible Markup Language.
7. What does RSS stand for?
Really Simple Syndication
8. Name the two main ways search engines discover new content?
Links and XML sitemaps
9. What is the difference between a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect?
A 301 redirect is permanent and a 302 redirect is temporary
10. Name a tool that you can use to view cache/cache date?
SEObook toolbar
11. Name a tool that you can use to set you user agent to Googlebot
User Agent Switcher
12. Name a tool that you can use to crawl a website?
Screaming Frog
13. What does the 500 status code tell you?
That there is a server error and that there is no content accessible either to crawlers or search engines
