Knowledge check: how search engines work
1. A new page on your site isn’t showing up on Google. What’s the most likely first cause to check?
- a. Your backlink profile
- b. Your Core Web Vitals
- c. Indexing status in GSC
- d. Your title tag
Answer
c. Always check whether Google has even indexed the page before debugging anything else. See indexing.2. What does Googlebot need before it can index a page?
- a. It needs to crawl it
- b. It needs a backlink
- c. It needs an XML sitemap entry
- d. It needs structured data
Answer
a. Crawl comes first. Sitemaps help discovery; backlinks help authority; schema helps understanding - but none replace the crawl. See crawling.3. Which is NOT a ranking signal Google uses?
- a. Content relevance
- b. Backlinks
- c. Google Analytics bounce rate
- d. Core Web Vitals
Answer
c. Google does not use GA data as a ranking input. See ranking.4. AI Overviews typically appear for which type of query?
- a. Brand searches
- b. Transactional product searches
- c. Informational, beginner, multi-step queries
- d. Local pack searches
Answer
c. See the AI Overview keyword study.5. Your sitemap lists 10,000 URLs but GSC shows only 2,000 indexed. What’s the most useful next step?
- a. Build more backlinks
- b. Inspect the not-indexed reasons in the GSC Pages report
- c. Resubmit the sitemap weekly
- d. Add structured data