Chapter 15 — Quiz

Twenty-four self-check questions: multiple choice and short answer. Answers are in the collapsed key at the bottom. No peeking until you've committed to an answer.

Multiple choice

1. "Crawl depth" of a page means: - A) The number of folders (slashes) in its URL - B) The number of clicks (link hops) to reach it from the homepage - C) How many words are on the page - D) How often Googlebot crawls it per month

2. Google's guidance suggests that a page's importance is best estimated by: - A) The number of slashes in its URL - B) Its word count - C) How many clicks it is from the homepage (link distance) - D) The alphabetical position of its URL

3. According to §15.4's simplified model, a page's outgoing link passes more link equity when the source page links to: - A) More pages - B) Fewer pages - C) Only external sites - D) Only pages in the same folder

4. An orphan page is best defined as a page that: - A) Has no outgoing links - B) Has a broken URL - C) No other page on the site links to - D) Is blocked by robots.txt

5. Keywords in the URL are, per Google's own statements, a ranking factor that is: - A) One of the top three factors - B) Very small / minor - C) Completely ignored - D) Only relevant for images

6. The primary reason NOT to rewrite an existing, indexed, traffic-earning URL just to add a keyword is: - A) Google bans keyword-rich URLs - B) You would break every link/bookmark to it and take on redirect maintenance for a tiny gain - C) URLs cannot contain hyphens - D) It would increase crawl depth automatically

7. "PageRank sculpting" with nofollow on internal links stopped working when Google changed nofollow's behavior. What happens now to the equity of a nofollowed internal link? - A) It is redirected to the other links on the page - B) It doubles - C) It evaporates (is not passed to other links) - D) It is stored for later

8. A hub-and-spoke structure is the architectural implementation of which content-strategy model from Chapter 8? - A) The inverted pyramid - B) The pillar-and-cluster model - C) The content audit - D) Keyword density

9. Which of these is a crawl trap? - A) A page with a long, comprehensive article - B) Thousands of ?color=&size=&sort= filter URLs generated by faceted navigation - C) A breadcrumb trail - D) A well-linked category hub

10. The single most abused piece of navigation for SEO, per the chapter, is: - A) The breadcrumb - B) The main navigation - C) The footer (stuffed with keyword-rich sitewide links) - D) The logo link

11. Which statement about internal linking is confirmed by Google (not merely correlation)? - A) "Internal links are 14% of ranking" - B) Internal links help Google find pages and understand a site's structure and the relative importance of its pages - C) Internal linking alone can rank a site with no external links - D) You must use exact-match anchor text on every internal link

12. The honest limit of internal linking is that it: - A) Manufactures authority from nothing - B) Redistributes earned authority but does not create it - C) Replaces the need for external links - D) Guarantees a #1 ranking for the target page

13. Between words in a URL, Google's long-standing recommendation is to separate them with: - A) Underscores - B) Spaces - C) Hyphens - D) Camel case

14. Which is the opposite problem from an orphan page? - A) A crawl trap (too many low-value URLs) - B) A slow page - C) A missing title tag - D) A duplicate meta description

Short answer

15. In one sentence, why can a genuinely excellent page still get zero traffic if nothing links to it?

16. State the difference between crawl depth and URL path depth, and which matters more.

17. Name the three-step method for strategic internal linking from §15.5.

18. What is the "three-click rule," and what is the honest, non-folklore version of the idea underneath it?

19. Explain how a breadcrumb passes link equity up a site, and why that is useful.

20. Give the legitimate alternative to "nofollow sculpting" for sending more authority to a priority page.

21. For the page stuck at #11, which specific gap did Chapter 15 close, and why is "positioned to move" a more honest phrase than "will now rank"?

22. What is a silo, and what is the difference between a physical and a virtual silo?

23. A site is made so "flat" that its homepage links to 800 pages. Give one problem this creates for humans and one for link flow.

24. Rivertown had three service pages linked from nowhere. Name the term for such pages and the one-move fix.

Answer key **1.** B — crawl depth is clicks from the homepage; the homepage is depth 0. (Slashes in the URL are a different thing — see Q16.) **2.** C — Google's Search Advocates have said link distance (clicks from home) matters more than URL-path depth for how important a page is treated. **3.** B — a page divides its equity among its outgoing links, so fewer links means a larger slice each. **4.** C — an orphan page is one that no other page on the site links to (it may still have outgoing links and sit in the sitemap). **5.** B — Google has repeatedly described keywords in the URL as a very small/minor ranking signal; the real value of good URLs is for humans. **6.** B — changing a working URL breaks inbound links and bookmarks and forces redirect maintenance, all for a tiny ranking hint; do it only for a genuine restructure/migration. **7.** C — since Google's 2009 change, a nofollowed link no longer passes its share to the other links; that share evaporates, so sculpting *loses* you authority. **8.** B — hub-and-spoke is the link-graph implementation of the pillar-and-cluster model (Chapter 8). **9.** B — faceted-navigation parameter combinations multiply into near-infinite low-value URLs, the classic crawl trap (deep-dived in Chapter 31). **10.** C — footers stuffed with dozens/hundreds of keyword-rich sitewide links are the classic abuse; a footer is for a handful of genuinely useful sitewide links. **11.** B — Google's documentation confirms internal links aid discovery and understanding of structure and relative importance. A is fabricated (no published weight); C is false (internal links don't manufacture authority); D is folklore. **12.** B — internal linking steers earned authority; it does not create it, and no internal pattern replaces external links. **13.** C — hyphens; underscores historically joined words, and spaces are encoded to `%20`. **14.** A — a crawl trap (too *many* low-value URLs) is the opposite of an orphan (too *few* links in). **15.** Because Google discovers pages mainly by following links, so a page nothing links to may never be found or crawled — its quality never reaches the ranking stage (and it receives no internal equity). **16.** Crawl depth = clicks to reach the page from the homepage; URL path depth = number of folders/slashes in the URL. Crawl depth (link distance) matters more — a long URL linked from the homepage is still "shallow." **17.** (1) Find your strongest pages; (2) find the underpowered target pages that deserve to rank; (3) add relevant internal links from the strong pages to the targets, with descriptive anchor text, where it genuinely helps the reader. **18.** The "three-click rule" is a usability heuristic (users shouldn't have to click more than ~3 times) mis-imported as a hard SEO law; it isn't one. The true idea underneath: keep important pages easy to reach and don't bury them deep — use clicks-from-home as a diagnostic, not a threshold. **19.** A breadcrumb appears on every child page and links up to its parent/category and home, so each deep page passes a share of its equity back up to the hub pages — reinforcing the importance of those hubs. **20.** Link to the priority page more often, from stronger and more relevant pages, with descriptive anchor text — and link to genuinely trivial pages less. Steer with real links, not with attributes that lose you equity. **21.** Chapter 15 added the *internal links* from pages that already have authority (the last fixable gap, after the title and comprehensiveness fixes in Chapter 9). "Positioned to move" is honest because we removed the fixable deficiencies and steered earned authority to the page, but external authority (Chapters 22–24) and the competition remain outside our control — we never promise a specific ranking. **22.** A silo groups content into distinct thematic sections whose internal links stay largely within each section. *Physical* siloing uses URL structure/folders to reflect the themes; *virtual* siloing creates the grouping through internal links regardless of URLs. **23.** For humans: an 800-link homepage/menu is unusable — no one can find anything. For link flow: the homepage's equity is split 800 ways, so each destination gets a vanishingly small slice, and Google gets no signal about which pages actually matter. **24.** They are **orphan pages**; the fix is to **link to them** from the relevant hub and related pages so they are discoverable and receive internal equity.