SEMrush Technical SEO Certification

1. What Elements Should Text Links Consist Of To Ensure The Best Possible SEO Performance?

• Anchor text, a-tag with href-attribute
• Nofollow attribute, anchor text
• a-tag with href-attribute, noindex attribute

2. What Is Link Juice?

• The number of links pointing at a certain page
• The value a hyperlink passes to a particular webpage
• Optimized website link hierarchy

3. What Are Two The Most Commonly Known Best Practices To Increase Crawling Effectiveness?

• Multiple links to a single URL
• Using linkhubs
• Meta robots nofollow
• Interlink relevant contents with each other
• Internal, link-level rel-nofollow

4. Choose Three Statements Referring To XML Sitemaps That Are True:

• XML sitemaps must only contain URLs that give a HTTP 200 response
• It is recommended to use gzip compression and UTF-8 encoding
• There can be only one XML sitemap per website
• XML sitemaps should usually be used when a website is very extensive
• It is recommended to have URLs that return non-200 status codes within XML sitemaps

5. Choose A Factor That Affects The Crawling Process Negatively.

• Duplicate pages/content
• A well-defined hierarchy of the pages
• Content freshness

6. Choose Two Statements That Are False About The SEMrush Audit Tool.

• It can be downloaded to your local computer
• It can’t audit desktop and mobile versions of a website separately
• It provides you with a list of issues with ways of fixing
• It allows you to include or exclude certain parts of a website from audit

7. What Is The Proper Instrument To Simulate Googlebot Activity In Chrome?

• Reverse DNS lookup
• User Agent Overrider
• User Agent Switcher

8. How Often Does The Option To Combine A Robots.Txt Disallow With A Robots.Txt Noindex Statement Make Folders Or URLs Appear In SERPs?

• Less than ones without noindex
• Never
• Occasionally

9. True Or False? It Is Not Possible To Have Multiple Robots Meta Tags.

• False
• True

10. Choose Two Correct Statements About A Canonical Tag:

• It should point to URLs that serve HTTP200 status codes
• It is useful to create canonical tag chaining
• Each URL can have several rel-canonical directives
• Pages linked by a canonical tag should have identical or at least very similar content

11. Fill In The Blank. It’s Not Wise To Index Search Result Pages Because _____

• Google prefers them over other pages because they are dynamically generated and thus very fresh.
• they do not pass any linkjuice to other pages
• those pages are dynamic and thus can create bad UX for the searcher

12. PRG (Post-Redirect-Get Pattern) Is A Great Way To Make Google Crawl All The Multiple URLs Created On Pages With Many Categories And Subcategories.

• True
• False

13. Choose The Wrong Statement.

• It is important to have all sub-pages of a category being indexed
• Proper pagination is required for the overall good performance of a domain in search results
• rel=next and rel=prev attributes explain to Google which page in the chain comes next or appeared before it
• Pagination is extremely important in e-commerce and editorial websites

14. You Have Two Versions Of The Same Content In HTML (On The Website And In PDF). What Is The Best Solution To Bringing A User To The Site With The Full Navigation Instead Of Just Downloading A PDF File?

• Using the X-robots-tag and the noindex attribute
• Introducing hreflang using X-Robots headers
• Using the X-robots rel=canonical header

15. What Does The 4XX HTTP Status Code Range Refer To?

• Server-side errors
• Client-side errors
• Redirects

16. Check All Three Reasons For Choosing A 301 Redirect Over A 302 Redirect:

• The rankings will be fully transferred to the new URL
• Link equity will be passed to the new URL
• To not lose important positions without any replacement
• The new URL won’t have any redirect chains

17. When Is It Better To Use The 410 Error Rather Than The 404? Choose Two Answers:

• When there is another page to replace the deleted URL
• If the page can be restored in the near future
• When the page existed and then was intentionally removed, and will never be back
• When you want to delete the page from the index as quickly as possible and are sure it won’t ever be back

18. What Is The Best Solution When You Know The Approximate Time Of Maintenance Work On Your Website?

• Using the 503 status code with the retry-after header
• Using the HTTP status code 200
• Using the noindex directive in your robots.txt file
• Using the 500 status code with the retry-after header

19. Choose Three Answers. What Information Can Be Found In An Access-Logfile?

• The method of the request (usually GET/POST)
• The request URL
• The server IP/hostname
• Passwords
• The time spent on a URL

20. True Or False? It Is Recommended To Work With Log Files Constantly, Making It A Part Of The SEO Routine Rather Than Doing One-Off Audits.

• True
• False

21. Which HTTP Code Ranges Refer To Crawl Errors? Choose Two Answers.

• 2xx range
• 3xx range
• 5xx range
• 4xx range

22. Choose Two Statements That Are Right.

• It is not a good idea to combine different data sources for deep analysis. It’s much better to concentrate on just one data source, e.g. logfile
• Combining data from logfiles and webcrawls helps compare simulated and real crawler behavior
• If you overlay your sitemap with your logfiles, you may see a lack of internal links that shows that the site architecture is not working properly

23. Choose Two Answers. Some Disadvantages Of CcTLDs Are:

• They have strong default geo-targeting features, e.g. .fr for French
• They may be unavailable in different regions/markets
• They need to be registered within the local market, which can make it expensive

24. Choose Two Http Response Status Codes That Will Work Where There Is Any Kind Of Geographical, Automated Redirect. We Are Talking About International Requests From Different Geographical Regions.

• 301 and 303
• 302 and 301
• 302 and 303

25. You Have Site Versions For France And Italy And You Set Up Two Hreflangs For Them. For The Rest Of Your End-Users You Plan To Use The English Version Of The Site. Which Directive Will You Use?

• <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/” hreflang=”x-default”/>
• <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en” hreflang=”uk”/>
• <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en” hreflang=”en-au”/>

26. True Or False? The SEMrush Site Audit Tool Allows You Only To Define Issues That Slow Down Your Website And Does Not Give Any Recommendations On How To Fix Them.

• True
• False

27. Choose Two Optimization Approaches That Are Useful For Performance Optimization:

• Avoid using new modern formats like WebP
• Asynchronous requests
• Increase the number of ССS files per URL
• Proper compression & meta data removal for images

28. True Or False? Pre-Fetch And Pre-Render Are Especially Useful When You Do Not Depend On 3rd Party Requests Or Contents From A CDN Or A Subdomain.

• True
• False

29. Fill In The Blank. According To The Latest Statistics, 60% Or More Of All Results For High Volume Keyword Queries In The TOP-3 Have Already Been Moved Over To Run On ______

• HTTP
• HTTPS
• FTP

30. What Are The Two Valid Statements With Regard To The Critical Rendering Path (CRP)?

• The non-critical CSS is required when the site starts to render
• There is an initial view (which is critical) and below-the-fold-content
• CRP on mobile is bigger than on a desktop
• The “Critical” tool on Github helps to build CCS for CRP optimisation

31. Choose The Correct Statement About Mark-Up.

• Invalid mark-up still works, so there’s no need to control it
• Even if GSC says that your mark-up is not valid, Google will still consider it
• Changes in HTML can break the mark-up, so monitoring is needed

32. Choose A Valid Statement About AMP:

• Using AMP is the only way to get into the Google News carousel/box
• AMP implementation is easy, there’s no need to rewrite HTML and build a new CSS
• CSS files do not need to be inlined as non-blocking compared to a regular version
• A regular website can never be as fast as an AMP version

33. Fill In The Blanks. When You Want To Use _____, Make Sure They Are Placed In Plain HTML/X-Robots Tags. _____ Injected By JavaScript Are Considered Less Reliable, And The Chances Are That Google Will Ignore Them.

• rel=amp HTML tags
• hreflang tags
• Canonical tags

34. Which Type Of Mobile Website Version Should You Use To Check If The “User Agent HTTP Header” Variable Is Included To Identify And Provide The Relevant Web Version To The Right User Agent?

• Responsive web design
• Independent/standalone mobile site
• Dynamic serving

35A Good Approach Is To Create Internal Competition. More Links To Different URLs Have The Same Anchor Text, Easier For Google Is To Differentiate Which Of Them Is The One URL On Your Domain To Be Ranked For The Given Keyword.

• True
• False