As hard as it is to assess ANY job candidate’s knowledge, it’s even harder with SEO candidates because there’s so much gray area in the industry. This blog series presents questions you can pose to help you determine a candidate’s level of knowledge.
Tell me one off-page optimization factor that is commonly believed to be important but isn’t.
This is the same as question #15, with one change: The focus is on off-page rather than on-page optimization. Use this as an opportunity to understand the candidate’s ability to be a thought leader. They are either out in front or getting left behind!
Here’s how I would answer:
A lot of people think that the text of incoming links is still valuable, but I’m not so sure anymore. I think this got spammed so much that any closely matching link text with the page optimization is more of a negative than a positive. It’s definitely something I would tread carefully with.