The Answer To This Interview Question:
Crawling is when search engines discover your pages. Rendering is how they understand the visual layout and content. Indexing is when they store your pages for possible ranking, and ranking is where those pages appear in search results. Optimizing involves ensuring crawlability, proper JavaScript rendering, clean HTML, and strong relevance for ranking.
What The Interviewer Really Wants To Hear:
The interviewer wants to ensure you grasp the full lifecycle of search engine interaction with your site and how you enhance each phase.
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Tips To Answer This Interview Question Successfully
Describe how each phase is critical for visibility.
Crawling is essential for discovery, so proper internal linking and robots.txt setup are key. Rendering ensures that Google can understand all the content, especially for JavaScript-heavy sites. Indexing is dependent on clean HTML and clear structure. Ranking depends on relevance and authority.
Explain how rendered source code differs from raw source code.
The rendered source code is what Google sees after all scripts have executed, while raw source code is the HTML before execution. JavaScript-heavy websites may have discrepancies, so it’s crucial to ensure SEO best practices like metadata and heading tags are present in the rendered source. I often check this using tools like Google’s mobile-friendly test to ensure the right content is being rendered.
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