News Source: http://www.seomoz.org
Published: Sep 11, 2007 - 02:12 am
Story Found By: squishee 2081 Days ago
Category: SEO
29 Comments
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News Source: http://www.seomoz.org
Published: Sep 11, 2007 - 02:12 am
Story Found By: squishee 2081 Days ago
Category: SEO
29 Comments
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Comments
Since it’s "25-35 minutes" I’ll have to grab some snacks. Love the colors on the page. Like a game show.
Looks good but way too tired and sick to play tonight :)
I did start on it, by the way -- but at three I got to one of those questions where I know what the "right" answer is supposed to be but totally disagree. I wish these quizzes had a third option -- "You’re Wrong & Here’s Why" with an open ended text entry box :)
Actually a pretty decent test to take while eating dinner and watching Monday Night Football.. I’ll use that excuse for scoring 72% rather than fall back on the SEO is a hobby and I make jewelry to feed my family excuse.. I suspect everyone else here should score much higher.. I do like the fact that you get some indication of when you get something wrong while taking the test..
Pffft. 79% at 2 a.m. with several answers that I disagree on after reading the results, and one question wrong that I totally misread.
I kinda ran out of oil around question 15. I’ll refuel and tackle the remaining 60 tomorrow...:)
It’s broken. It gave me a good score :P
Yeah, Danny... it stopped me down too. Then #5. Etc. Kinda reminds me of the last one. :D
Not too bad... 86% But I also have a problem with a few of the questions. #48 should probably be rewritten since I’m sure all of the options are speculated by at least someone. For #67, try getting a URL without the trailing slash using a tool like WebBug, and you’ll see that the answer is a little more complex than True or False.
"You’re Wrong & Here’s Why" with an open ended text entry box :)" Yeah, one or two outright wrong (IMV), a couple of others a matter of interpretation or debate. All around pretty good though, confirmed my strengths, weaknesses and stuff I just ignore.
Just made it as SEO Professional :-) Overall I thought the SEO quiz was a good test for those who practice SEO. I agree with readers here, I had to think twice about some of the questions, but the overall look and feel and usability especially with the status bar is a good indication of how well you are doing. Thumbs up to SEOMoz!!
It will be interesting to see if he collates the results and releases a list of how many people chose each option for each question. That information would be telling as to where most people lack information, or which questions were contentious.
Just think of all the inbound links to that page with the phrase "SEO Expert." :) Genius, I’m telling you....
lol, great point Matt. ;-)
I was doing it like at 2am and got way too sleepy after question 25... will test my skills some time soon!!!
I probably can’t justify this as "work-related research," so I’ll have to come back and do this when I’m not on the clock.
My comments were too long to write here, so I had to do an entire post on the subject: http://sphinn.com/story/5274 The best moment was when the quiz explained why I answered a question wrong by quoting me.
I thought this quiz was fun...but that the language of some of the questions was a little hard to interpret, and a few of the ’correct’ answers struck me as debatable, as I’ve seen others remarking. Neat idea. I was happy with my score. Miriam
... and your score was?
@DannySullivan: asks --what’s a "paginated" page?-- on http://searchengineland.com/070911-205145.php This is a duplicate content issue that occurs on most forums and in some blogging software. In a forum, on the thread listing pages, todays topics are all at /showforum.php?forum=234&page=1 and some time later, when new threads have appeared on page 1, they will all have moved on to page 2 at /showforum.php?forum=234&page=2 and a little later again they will be on /showforum.php?forum=234&page=3 instead. Every day the content of all of those pages "moves" to the next numbered page. It is a major factor that screws up the indexing of most forums out there. If the oldest thread had been on page one, and then new threads had expanded on to page two and then on to page three, then the threads originally listed on page one would still be on page one, even months or years later. Instead, by choosing to put the "newest" content on page one, every day the content of every page changes, and every day a new page appears, perhaps page 408 today, and that page will contain links to the *oldest* content on the site. This is a very unstable situation. Depending on reindexing frequency, compared to forum thread generation frequency, it is possible that page 2 gets indexed and then just as the bot goes to spider and index page 1, someone posts some new threads and those threads listed at the bottom of page one now drop off on to page 2. Page one then gets indexed, but those threads that just jumped pages don’t get indexed. Next day they make the jump from page 2 to 3 just as the bot has done with page 3 and is about to do page 2, and so they get missed again. Or, maybe they get indexed once, but then their link appears to go "missing" (as the bot indexes a page just after the link moved to a page that had already been indexed) and so they no longer get any backlink credit from within their own site. For most sites the content will be indexed again and again as it jumps pages. For topics that are old and no longer being posted to, this must appear as some sort of duplicate content to search engines. The content on page 258 is identical to the content seen on page 257 yesterday and 256 the day before. I have written a lot about duplicate content in the last five years and this is just about one of the dumbest design decisions that most forums have inadvertantly implemented. That error is everywhere, vBulletin, PHPbb, the lot.
73% there was one that I just miss-red though.
Jeeze - I should take this again when I’m awake. I answered a meta-tag question (and all questions about Ask.com) wrong.
I’ve gone over the quiz and made many edits, dropped a few questions where I felt the criticism was well deserved and changed many others. I have no expectation that this will satisfy everyone, but I hope that it’s at least a better product now.
Tim - I got the meta-tag one wrong as well, I thought they still counted for Yahoo. The one that I miss-red was the which link would not have the most value, I never red it properly and answered the one with the most link value. There were a few others that I kicked myself about afterwards.
@g1smd: Ah! Thank you. But if you put a noindex tag into something like VB to block this, isn’t it going to end up blocking ALL your paginated pages? Cause it’s going to use a standard template for them all. I agree -- if you can block out some of those pages without hurting the "main" one, might be useful.
Great fun. There will always be disagreement on the "correct" answers and the wording, the tendency to overthink, etc. but such is the nature of quizzes in the first place. I’m happy with a 77 for a quick pass through on the questions. This is the best example of link bait I’ve seen in some time, and the reinforcement provided with the "correct" answers actually provides something of value too!
@DannySullivan: Yes! You’re correct in your assumptions. If you block *those* paginated pages, you completely stop the bots from getting round the site. The thread listings are the main method for bots to index the whole site. They are the master index to access the content. The other major forum design foul-up is that an existing thread like /showtopic?t=56789 links to the "next" thread (by time of latest posting) and the "previous" thread (likewise), with URLs like /showtopic?t=56789&action=nextoldest and /showtopic?t=56789&action=nextnewest which creates two more duplicate content URLs for each thread. The error is compounded further when one of the threads is bumped with a new posting. Now the /showtopic?t=56789&action=nextoldest URL points to a DIFFERENT thread than the one it pointed to just a moment ago. This problem comes directly from the fact that the threadID in the URL is of the page you are about to LEAVE, not the thread ID of the one that you are about to VISIT. That is very very dumb design. I raised these issues about four years ago, but most designers still seem to have no clue as to how these factors so badly affect their indexing and ranking. The URL/site structure that you present to search engine bots is crucial in how they treat your site. There are other problems with most forums and blogs (www and non-www Duplicate Content issues, Print-Friendly page Duplicate Content issues, parameters the same but in a different order causing Duplicate Content issues (lots of examples), URLs with redundant extra parameters, millions of "private" URLs [new topic, reply to thread, send PM, login, report post, etc] returning an "Error. You are not logged in" page that gets indexed, etc), but that touches on a couple of the most important ones. I could go on about this stuff for hours...
Oh, and http://www.google.com/search?q=site:resource-zone.com&num=100&filter=0 for the site: SERPs for a site that has been tweaked to remove more than 750 000 useless and duplicate content URLs from the SERPs. There is still *some* duplication caused by some pages having a different parameter order. Heh. If every forum did this work, it would give Google perhaps five billion less junk URLs to spider and reject (est. 50 000 forums x 100 000 URLs). (I have no idea how many forums really exist, the point was to show that a small design change could make a vast global difference).
"I’ve gone over the quiz and made many edits, dropped a few questions where I felt the criticism was well deserved and changed many others. I have no expectation that this will satisfy everyone, but I hope that it’s at least a better product now." Oh, no. We have to take it AGAIN????