SEO has come out of age and has become a reputable career option and there are multiple job opportunities that exists in the Online Industry worldwide for SEO professionals. I have tried to prepare a Questionnaire that are usually asked in SEO Interviews at various levels. Collected it with the help of various online sources and hope it will help refreshing the concepts. This will be in a set of series so check out blog regularly for latest updates.

Series I – Search Engines

What is Google PR as shown on Google toolbar?
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be.

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page one of the co-founder of Google. The PageRank process has been patented and assigned to Stanford University.

What is Trust Rank?
TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in a paper by Yahoo! Yahoo’s TrustRank method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages.

What is Search Engine Crawler?
A search engine crawler is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical manner in order to provide up to date data to the particular search engine. Googlebot is the name of Google crawler. Yahoo! Slurp is a web crawler from Yahoo & MSN Bot is the Web Crawler by MSN.

What is Search Engine Index?
Search engine indexing is the process of a search engine collecting, parses and stores data for use by the search engine. The actual search engine index is the place where all the data the search engine has collected is stored. It is the search engine index that provides the results for search queries, and pages that are stored within the search engine index that appear on the search engine results page.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing used by search engines like Google?
In today´s traditional search approach, when a user types a keyword for searching, the search engine searches through its collection of document for the typed keyword. It checks for the exact typed keyword in all the documents and returns only those documents which contained it and ranks it on some ranking algorithm. Words
which are same in meaning but spelled out differently would be totally ignored in the Search results (SERPs.)
To address this important issue of presenting only relevant search results, Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI was proposed as a new improved method of retrieval system. Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn’t focus on a single keyword when
optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

What is meant by Everflux?
Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux. In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

What is Google Bowling?
Knocking a competitor out of the search results by pointing hundreds or thousands of low trust low quality links at their website.

What is Google Bombing?
Making a pank rank well for a specific search query by pointing hundreds or thousands of links at it with the keywords in the anchor text.

What is Google Supplemental Index?
Index where pages with lower trust scores are stored. Pages may be placed in Google’s Supplemental Index if they consist largely of duplicate content, if the URLs are excessively complex in nature, or the site which hosts them lacks significant trust.

What are Stop Words?
Common words (ex: a, to, and, is …) which add little relevancy to a search query, and are thus are removed from the search query prior to finding relevant search results. It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content.

What is Google Juice?
Internet slang to refer to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much ‘Google Juice’ and pages which link to highly ‘juicy’ pages acquire some reflected ‘Google Juice’.

What is Googlewhack?
A Google search query consisting of two words, that returns a single result.

What is Grey Hat SEO?
SEO using both Black Hat and White Hat techniques.

What are Hallway pages?
a page that serves as an index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well.