Hello, YOUmozzers! This is my first ever YOUmoz blog post and possibly my last, depending on how well SEOmoz can handle a little bit of constructive criticism. ;)

Up until about 3 weeks ago, I was working at a fairly well-known SEO firm, but unfortunately, my valid SEO theories and genius-grade ideas weren't welcome there, so I decided to strike out on my own! SEOs are a dime a dozen these days, so I have been looking for ways to differentiate myself and establish some sort of credibility... without having to namedrop my previous employer. The SEOmoz SEO Expert Quiz immediately grabbed my attention, and I vowed to unleash a fury of SEO information, the likes of which the world has never seen!

Well... that didn't exactly happen. On the contrary, my dream of SEO world-domination was sucker-punched by an offensively-low test score that was obviously doped up on programmatic errors and arguable responses to ambiguous questions. So traumatic was this result that I immediately lost my will to live, and without thinking I leapt through my office window like some kind of suicidal Hollywood stuntman! As the shattering glass cut into my non-SEO-expert flesh, I spread out into a perfect swan dive and prepared for the 30-story drop that would end my miserable existence. Unfortunately, I work out of my one-story house, so the drop was only 3 feet... and it ended with me landing in a generic pine-scented hedge. So I'm moving forward with plan B... which is to whine, complain, and argue about what I think the SEO Expert Quiz's answers SHOULD have been... and then possibly manipulate my SEO Quiz logo to make myself feel better. So here we go...

RESULTS:  You scored 184/255 points (73%)

The first thing I noticed was that several of my correct responses didn't "get counted" for some reason. They just showed up as blanks and were therefore marked wrong. I don't know what I did to create this error, but it gypped me out of 12 correct answers! The odd part is... the "Level" bar (the graph that fills up as you submit correct answers) acknowledged my answers. So when it gave the results, it looked like this:

Notice how full the bar is? That's certainly not a 27% gap at the top!

Here you can see that "Your Answer:" is blank... but leaving a question blank isn't an actual option when you're taking the test. You have to choose an answer in order to see the next question!

I can pretty easily justify adding those points to my "real" score, but these next ones are a bit trickier. I'll display the questions as screenshots, as not to make the test questions/answers any more "Googleable" than they have to be. I will also refer to the possible choices by A, B, C, etc., even though letters aren't actually displayed next to the answers.

QUESTION 8:

My Answer:  A

Right Answer:  B

First of all... I don't stand behind any of these choices 100%, but I think that choice A is the "least wrong" answer. The best argument against choice A (that I can see) is that keywords found in Meta Description tags aren't heavily weighted, compared to the Title tag. The fact is, however, that no one truly knows how search engine algorithms work... and therefore, the definition of "important" in choice A is purely subjective speculation.

However, I feel that choice B has two arguments against it. The first is that Google builds its SERP snippets from any page content that contains the query--not just from the Meta Description tag. In fact, I would estimate that the vast majority of search results do NOT contain Meta Descriptions in the snippet... simply because the average webpage's body section offers so many more chances to provide the most-relevant content for any given query.

My second counterargument to choice B is that even when the Meta Description DOES show up in the SERPs, it doesn't have nearly the amount of influence on click-through that the Title does. If your page has a user-friendly Title with relevant keywords, the Meta Description probably won't even get noticed.

A third counterargument (that many of you might discount, since it is more opinion than fact) is that optimizing a page's SERP snippet for higher click-through does not qualify as "search engine optimization," according to the most widely-accepted definition of that phrase. Choice B implies that "search engine optimization" includes any kind of content modification that results in more search engine traffic. Under that same liberal definition, I could argue that overbidding on PPC listings is considered SEO.

QUESTION 12:

My Answer:  D

Right Answer:  B

It can be argued that choice D is "more correct" because the phrase "while SEM covers PPC, or paid search" does not irrefutably mean that SEM covers PPC EXCLUSIVELY. In other words, the use of the word "while" does not explicitly imply that SEM cannot also refer to organic/natural listings.

Furthermore, this question is entirely subjective to begin with, and it asks about the majority opinion of a group that it never defines. If you ask the entire English-speaking population what the difference is, the answer is probably something like "one ends in 'O' and the other ends in 'M'."  :P

QUESTION 36:

My Answer:  D

Right Answer:  C

Every one of these choices is completely wrong, except for D. Choice A is a disadvantage, B is simply false, C is false if we can find just one advantage, D is at least partially right, and E is simply false.

The article that is linked to in the explanation of choice C offers information on the outcome of an experiment that Danny Sullivan performed. He discovered that Yahoo and Ask DO in fact factor the Meta Keywords content into their search results. He also recommends placing keyword misspellings in the Meta Keywords tag. Since there exists a small chance of using the Meta Keywords tag to your advantage, choice C is false.

QUESTION 42:

My Answer:  D

Right Answer:  B

There are thousands of sites that are hosted on the same IP address, and statistically, this situation is way too common for Google to perform any kind of computational analysis on the IP address of every link it crawls. Therefore, choice D is least likely to decrease the value of a link.

Choice B is the only option that says the linked-to page is also linking out to an external page. Therefore, the value (defined by the resulting increase in a site's search engine rankings) of the inbound link is offset by the PageRank that is "lost" through the outbound link.

QUESTION 64:

My Answer:  A

Right Answer:  B

Duplicate content occurs much more frequently within the pages of a single domain, but this question uses words like "issue" and "problem," which are measured by the negative consequences that result from duplicate content--not by frequency of occurrence. In other words, if two of your site's pages are considered duplicate content, then Google will rank only one of them. The other will be filtered from SERPs or Google will combine the stats of both pages into one entry in their index. Neither of these consequences is too severe, since at least one of the pages is still ranking. However, if another domain is duplicating your content, there is a chance that your page will be filtered and the other domain's page will rank. This is a much more serious problem, because now you don't rank at all.

Not counting the wrong answers I've just argued, there were 2 questions that I got wrong "for reals." They were questions 35 and 59. The only way I can accurately modify my quiz score is if I know the specific point values of each of those questions, which I don't. So I will try a couple of alternate methods...

Guess the Point Values:

The total points possible are 255 and there are 75 questions, so that puts the average point value at 3.4 points. Now if I were making a test with weighted point totals, I would weight them on a scale of 1-5 points, with 5 being the most difficult or most important questions. Based on that, I'd assign questions 35 and 59 the values 5 and 3, respectively, which puts my point loss total at 8. 255 minus 8 is 247, and 247 divided by 255 rounds to 97%! (This is assuming that I successfully argued my way out of the other 5 wrong answers.  :P )

Measure the Level Bar:

As you can see in the previous screenshot image, the Level bar kept track of my score, despite the buggy total percentage. If the programming logic of the Level bar is reasonable, then the percent of "filled" bar should be roughly equal to my test score percentage (before adding the argued points). Here is that analysis...

Original Level Bar (turned sideways):

Filled Portion of Level Bar: 396 pixels

Empty Portion of Level Bar (painted blue so you can see it): 4 pixels

396 divided by 400 is 99%! (And that's without adding my argument points!)

Conclusion:

I'm just going to go ahead and average the two scores and say I got a 98%. But that's just a number... I still need a fancy SEOmoz logo to display it. For that, I resort to a little bit of reverse engineering. After a quick "optimization" of the HTML code I was given, I now proudly present my official SEOmoz SEO Expert Quiz score!

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