SEO Quiz: Test Your SEO Knowledge in 12 Questions

1. A page is disallowed in robots.txt and also carries a noindex tag. What happens?

Googlebot has to fetch the page to see the noindex rule. Blocking the URL in robots.txt stops that fetch, so the rule is never read and the URL can still appear if something links to it. Let the page be crawled and serve the noindex tag, or put it behind auth.

2. You set rel="canonical" on a duplicate page. Does Google have to honour it?

Google's own wording is that the canonical tag is a strong signal, and it still decides which URL to show. When your declared canonical loses, the usual reasons are internal links pointing elsewhere, a conflicting sitemap entry, or two pages that were never close enough duplicates.

3. You are retiring a URL permanently and want its signals to move. Which status code?

A 301 says the move is permanent, so the signals consolidate on the destination. 302 and 307 both say temporary, and Google will usually keep the old URL indexed. On a migration this one decision, repeated across a few thousand URLs, is most of the risk.

4. How long can a title tag be before Google truncates it?

The 60-character figure is a rule of thumb people picked up from tools. What actually gets cut off a title tag depends on the width of the glyphs, and Google may swap in heading text or the site name anyway. Preview it before you ship.

5. Is the meta description a ranking factor?

Google does not rank on the description. The meta description tag still earns its place, because a description that matches the query gets a better snippet and more clicks.

6. Your English page points at the Turkish page with hreflang. The Turkish page points nowhere. What does Google do?

The hreflang tag is a two-way handshake. Every page in the cluster names every other page, itself included, and a one-legged cluster gets dropped. It buys no ranking lift either. It decides which version gets shown to whom, which is why international SEO treats it as plumbing.

7. What does Largest Contentful Paint measure?

LCP is about the moment the main content is visibly there. It is one of the three Core Web Vitals, alongside INP for responsiveness and CLS for layout stability.

8. You've added valid Product schema. Will the rich result appear?

Eligibility is what schema markup buys you. Google still weighs the page and the query before it shows an enhanced result, and it can switch a rich result type off for a whole site. Validate first, then treat the appearance as something you monitor, the way a structured data review does.

9. Two internal links point at the same page. One says "click here", the other says "technical SEO audit". What changes?

Anchor text is one of the few places where you describe a page from the outside, and internal links are the set you fully control. Someone on a screen reader can pull up a list of links with no surrounding sentence, so the wording carries weight there too.

10. Three of your pages target the same query and keep swapping positions. What is this called?

Cannibalization splits the signals one page could have held. The fix is usually consolidation. Pick the page that should win, redirect or merge the others, repoint the internal links, and confirm the picture with a content and keyword audit.

11. You added 500 new URLs to your XML sitemap. Google has to index them now, right?

A sitemap is a discovery aid. Google says outright that listing a URL does not guarantee it will be crawled or indexed. When a large batch stays out of the index, the answer is usually somewhere in the pages themselves.

12. The same article is reachable at three URLs on your own site. Is that a penalty?

There is no duplicate content penalty for repeated URLs on your own site. Google groups them and shows the one it treats as canonical. Copying someone else’s content is a different matter and falls under the spam policies. A technical crawl audit is where these clusters usually surface.