Tuesday, 15 March 2011

Presenting the Winners of the Google Webmaster Quiz!

Thanks to all of you for the overwhelming response to our webmaster quiz. Today, we're pleased to present the webmaster quiz answers! We hope the quiz gave you an opportunity to look into our SEO Starter Guide to find answers to some common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion on our forum.

1) Your primary server is going to be moved and it will be unavailable for a day. What is the most appropriate HTTP status code that your backup server should return?

Correct answer: 3) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests.

Explanation: The 503 HTTP status code is very useful when your site is facing a downtime. This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than a 503 HTTP status code. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.

2) Some of you site's pages are in Hindi while the rest are in English. How will you inform Google about this?

Correct answer: 3) Googlebot will figure this out by itself, so nothing special needs to be done.

Explanation: We recommend sticking to a single language per page, as this makes it easier for search engines and users to understand the language used and your content.

3) How many PDF files has Google indexed?

Correct answer: 3) Less than 200 Million

Explanation: You can easily find web documents of a particular file extension using the “filetype:” operator.http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:pdf. This shows that there are about 190,000,000 results for PDF files on Google. Another great operator for webmasters is the “site:” operator. The “site:” operator is not meant to diagnose issues on your website; for a more exact count, we recommend submitting Sitemaps. Here’s a list of some of our most popular tools and operators to help refine and improve your search.

Excellent work by everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! Please find below usernames of the top scorers. Congratulations on the quiz well done!
  • Amit Agarwal (all answers correct!)
  • riyaz
  • sweetfish
  • Ankur Jain
  • reject
  • Kishan Bagaria
  • Quark
  • Preeti Prakash
  • nidhinmd
Honorable mentions go to : Remiz Rahnas, TOMHTML, Karthik, Kerin, Iain Henderson, Bharath Kumar Nakka, jsteverman, Crash, Koti Ivaturi, Priyanka Sachar, Ceejo, Abdul Malick, Mohit Vashisht, Rakesh Narang, crm911, anuj, foo, Udit Hotchandani, Navneet Kaushal, and mark.


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