Table of Contents

Top 100 SEO Interview Questions with Answers

While going to an SEO interview, we think about the top interview questions and the conversations which the interviewer will do with us.

Digital Marketing has grown to be one of the top professional opportunities nowadays and SEO is one of the most demanded knowledge of Digital Marketing.

Surely, skills like Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, and Analytics will make more than 200k+ positions in the coming years

Before going to an SEO interview talk, it’s smarter to go through the sorts of SEO interview questions that you will be asked so that you can intellectually get ready to answer them.

But before we dive into interview questions, let’s get to know more about SEO.

SEO Searches on Google Trends

Above is the Google Trend Stats, which tells that SEO is more trending worldwide than Digital Marketing. Isn’t it surprising?

This proves SEO is still the MOST dominant traffic channel online.

Reasons to Pick SEO as A Career :

Here are a few reasons to choose SEO as a career in 2022 and beyond.

1. HUGE Need for SEO Services (Worldwide)

Every business today, be it big or small, wants to rank on Google.

Higher the ranking, the better the traffic right?

For this, SEO professionals are needed by companies.

As an SEO professional, you have the skills to optimize the website and make the website rank higher on Google, the largest search engine platform.

2.SEO Professionals Make Good Money By Doing Job

All SEO professionals earn a handsome amount of salary. Freshers can earn about INR 1.8-2.8 lakhs per annum, experts with over 5-8 years of SEO experience can make about INR 3.5-12 lakh per annum.

The salary depends on many factors like your knowledge, technical skills, communication skills and more.

The more the experience, the more it will be easy for you to face challenges.

3.Many SEO Job Openings in India

The SEO career openings in India are large.

There are numerous jobs obtainable in the SEO field.

seo jobs on naukri.com

There are over 12000 job vacancies in India as of now

Companies are always searching for good SEO professionals, both experienced and freshers.

Once you apply for a SEO Job vacancy, the company will call you for an interview session.

To take care of you, We have made the top SEO interview questions and answers manual to help you understand SEO and its questions in a better way. You can also join our Digital Marketing Course to know all subjects of Digital Marketing.

This article is in three parts and is better ordered for studying purposes.

It will direct you through the Beginner level interview questions, Intermediate level interview questions, and Expert level interview questions that you may need to handle when you go for an interview.

Tip: While you begin answering interview questions you may go ahead with an example of a company selling a product or go ahead with the same company you are interviewing for.

Here, let’s take an example of a company selling sports goods, and let’s begin answering these interview questions.

1. Beginner Level SEO Interview Questions & Answers

1. Define SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Marketing.

2. Define Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization implies the way toward improving your site to build its visibility when individuals look for items or terms identified with your business in search engines.

For example if you are selling certain sports goods, then the way you will improve your brand’s visibility so that users will come across your product is called SEO.

3. Why do you think SEO is important?

SEO is important because it helps to gain visibility of our website page on search engines.

Consumers trust search engines and achieving the best position in web index rankings signs to searchers that your web page is a trustworthy source. This is the SEO purpose.

If you rank higher on results pages, you will get more clicks and traffic to your site page.

4. Explain Search Engine.

A search engine is a software program that serves individuals with discovering the data they are searching for on the web using keywords or phrases.

When a user enters a term to search, the web crawler takes a look at the site page titles, body and keywords it has ordered and uses calculations (bit by bit activities) to create a report of addresses—with the most important sites at the first spot on the list.

5. Name a few popular Search Engines other than Google.

Some popular search engines other than Google are,

Bing

Yandex

DuckDuckGo

Yahoo

Baidu

YouTube is a great search engine for videos. It is the second most popular search engine when it comes to traffic.

6. Who founded Google?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of Google while they were seeking a Ph.D. at Stanford University, California.

7. In which year Google was established?

Google was established in 1998.

8. What does Google stand for?

The word GOOGLE doesn’t stand for anything. It’s not an acronym. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin began the company they called it Backrub.

After they realized they required a new name, they wanted to name it Googol. When they desired to register they misspelled it Google and the rest is history.

9. What is Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox Effect is a plan that states fresh websites are normally in the ordeal period (inside a box) and can’t rank well for their most valuable keywords. The theory states Google requires some time to recognize before taking it out of that ideal area. It may be caused by creating too many links within a short period.

It has never been announced formally but was notified when the Google team was talking about various topics.

10. Explain Google Autocomplete?

Google Autocomplete is a function in Google and different search engines. When a user begins typing in the search box, the Google autocomplete function provides you a list of choices to complete your search.

digital vidya search on google.com

It aids users to complete the search with shorter time and effort, particularly when you are exploring from a mobile device. The search suggestions are based on common searches and also based on your search account.

11. Do you know Googlebot?

Googlebot is Google’s web crawler to locate, crawl, and index web pages.

12. What are organic results ?

The organic search centers on unpaid rankings in search results. SEO is used by businesses to optimize their site’s visibility or rankings.

13. What are paid results?

The paid search centers on paid rankings. It enables users to pay for a leading spot.

If you are paying for ads to display your sports goods to enhance the visibility of your brand then you will see paid results.

14. Explain referral traffic.

If a user comes to your brand’s website by visiting a link to your sports goods on social media or seeing a link to your site from another website then it is referral traffic.

It is the section of traffic that arrives on your website through another origin, like through a link or a different domain.

15. Explain Blog Commenting.

Blog Commenting is a method of adding comments on blog posts with a suitable backlink to your website.

There are two kinds of blog commenting. Automated and Manual. Automated commenting is ordinarily a scammy process where you don’t view a blog post and remark on a large scale. It does not add any benefit to the browser or publicist.

Manual commenting is when you choose appropriate sites, go through the blog post, add your view in the frame of a comment, join with the author and share your appropriate blog post/page which can be valuable to other readers.

16. Explain web crawling.

A web crawler, spider, or search engine bot downloads and indexes content across the Internet.

Such a bot aims to learn what almost every webpage on the web is about so that the data can be recovered when it’s needed.

17. Explain web hosting.

An online service that allows you to publish your website or web application on the Internet is Web Hosting.

18. Define SERP.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.In simple words, it’s the page that presents search results whenever you search for something on a search engine.

The page where your products are displayed when a user puts a query, then that page is SERP.

19. Explain PPC?

Pay Per Click or PPC is a sort of advertisement campaign in which promoters are imposed when users click on the advertisement.

20. Explain CTR?

CTR fills for Click Through Rate. We can obtain it by dividing the number of impressions by the number of clicks. For example, if you got 20 clicks out of 200 impressions your CTR would be 10%.

21. Explain EMD?

EMD stands for Exact Match Domain.

It is a domain that includes search phrases.

For example:

buysportshoes.com

22. What is a keyword?

A keyword is a focus word that describes the content on your page or post best. It’s the term that you want to rank for with a specific page. So when that search term is searched by a user on Google or other search engines, they should discover that page on your website.

Like for your sports goods brand , the keywords can be “cricket bat” or “tennis ball”.

23. Explain keyword difficulty?

Keyword Difficulty is an estimate of how difficult it is to rank for a specific word in Google’s organic search results. A keyword’s difficulty is based on several factors, like domain authority, page authority, and content quality.

24. Explain keyword frequency.

It is the number of times your keyword appears on your post.

If you are writing a blog on your website about “Why tennis balls are not used in cricket” then the number of times you will use your keywords like “tennis ball” and “cricket” will be your keyword frequency.

It is important to limit insertion of keywords in a post to avoid spamming or keyword stuffing.

25. Explain Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity represents the interval between two keywords on a web page.

26. What is Keyword Density?

Keyword Density is the rate of times a keyword or phrase surfaces on a particular web page. When the keyword density is far more than the suggested level, it might trigger crawlers to consider its keyword stuffing. So, we need to assure that the keyword density is not too much for any primary or subsequent search phrases.

For instance, if a primary keywords arrive 5 times in a blog of 200 words, the density would be 2.5%. There is no perfect keyword density but 3-4% is acknowledged as best practice for SEO.

27. What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO practice that expands the number of keyword occurrences to a far greater range to rank for possible keywords. Following the Panda update, it’s not advised to stuff keywords to manipulate search engines and should be dodged at all costs.

28. What is Keyword Stemming?

Keyword Stemming is a method of recognizing the root word of a keyword and building new keywords by joining suffixes, prefixes, and pluralization.

29. What is Keyword Prominence?

Keyword Prominence determines where your keyword is placed on a web page. For instance, in an article section, it is better to have your keyword in the column, particularly in the first and closing paragraphs.

30. What are long tail keywords?

Long-tail keywords are phrases that have more than 4 words and are very specific.

31. What are SEO tools?

SEO tools examine the potential of Web pages for high ranking on SERPs. They give information on backlinks, keywords, SEO competition insights and competitive analysis on the Internet. Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Screaming Frog, SEMRush are renowned tools used by SEO Professionals to analyze if the content is search engine friendly.

32. What are Search Engine Spiders?

A search engine spider is a kind of bot that is typically run by search engines like Google and Bing. Their objective is to arrange the content of websites all across the Internet so that the websites can surface in search engine results.

33. What does Google Search Console do?

It is also known as the Google Webmaster tool.

It helps you to monitor your website’s health in the eyes of Google. It assists you to examine the performance of your website and encourages you to optimize it better. It helps you to obtain a list of mistakes on the website. It is a free tool from Google.

34. What does Google Analytics do?

The free version of Google Analytics is enough if your website is mid-level. It assists you to know the performance of your website, explains the presence of the visitors, helps you achieve better in terms of conversions, and more.

35. Explain Anchor tag.

An HTML element that creates a link to a target URL is known as an anchor tag.

When rightly executed, the link can wrap around text, images, or buttons, so that users can associate with it and visit the link’s destination.

36. What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is the method of marking a website page with a browser-based tool so that we can easily visit it again later. Rather than saving social media posts to your browser bookmarks, you can utilize different platforms’ features to bookmark posts.

37. Define Contextual backlinks.

Links that are embedded within content, such as a blog or article, rather than something like a business directory are contextual.

38. Define exit rate.

The percentage of all visits which ended on a specific page is the exit rate.

39. What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to the page ranking factors that happen off your website, such as backlinks from a different site, domain authority, promotional method used by you, etc.

Local listing,social networking, article submissions are a few examples of off page seo.

40. What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO is optimizing various parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings. Your website position in search engine results pages is defined by several ranking factors like site accessibility, page speed, content optimization, keywords, title tags, etc. You have control over it and can change it on your website.

41. Explain Meta Descriptions.

The meta description is one of the web page’s meta tags. With this keyword meta tag data, webmasters can shortly describe the content and quality of the web page.

The description about your sports goods brand on your website is Meta description.

The page description of a web page is normally displayed when the page is listed for a specific query in SERP’s snippet or rich snippets

42. Explain Robots Meta tags.

Meta tags are used in HTML and XHTML reports providing structured metadata about a Web page. Meta Tags are important for On Page SEO.

Robots meta is used by search engine robots to understand the structure of the page.

43. Explain inbound links.

Links that come from another website or a different domain name are Inbound links.

44. Explain outbound links.

Links on your website that link to other websites with a different domain name are Outbound links.

For example, a link to your website saying “For purchasing sports goods visit..” is an inbound link for you whereas it is an outbound for the website which has referred you.

45. What is www?

WWW is the World Wide Web.

World wide web is a collection of websites or web pages collected in web servers and connected to local computers via the internet.

46. What is the URL?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.

It is the location of a web page or document on the www.

A URL structure has many parts.

It starts with a protocol (https, http, etc).

The various components of URL are :

Protocol: the system used to process the URL (https, http, etc)

Domain: the domain name (eg: digitalvidya.com)

Path: the folder and page of the website

Query string: parameters for active data

Hash: finds a particular section of a webpage.

A readable link to both human user and search engine crawler makes a friendly URL.

47. Explain Domain.

Address which is typed in the URL bar to reach a specific website is called Domain. The address in the URL bar linking to your website for eg. ”www.____.com” is your domain.

2. Intermediate Level SEO Interview Questions & Answers

48. How will you measure SEO success?

We can measure SEO success using web analytics tools.

Ranking, Traffic, and track conversions are the key performance indicators that should always be viewed when measuring an SEO’s effectiveness.

These KPIs not only allow you to accurately measure your campaign’s performance but also give you actionable data to improve your campaign over a period.

49. What is a SEO Audit?

The process of analyzing how adequate your web presence is an SEO audit.

The purpose of the audit is to know how many issues are affecting your organic search performance.

It helps to create a plan that will give measurable results.

50. Define Alt Tags.

An HTML attribute connected to image tags to give a text alternative for search engines is called an “ALt tag” or “Alt Attribution”

Say, for an image of a cricket bat product on your website the text alternative can be “CRICKET BAT”.

51. Explain DA .

DA is a Domain Authority.

DA defines the authority of your entire website. The higher the DA, the higher is the chance of ranking. DA is one of many ranking factors.

52. What is the importance of DA?

DA decides where your website lands on SERPs. Moz has developed DA. And it runs with Page Rank, a Google Algorithm.

It comprises a scale and scores that rank between 1 to 100. A website’s ability to rank better is determined by its high score.

53. Explain PA.

PA is Page Authority.

The authority of a specific page depended on the backlink, social sharing, etc is called PA.

54. What are 301 redirects?

301 redirect is a constant redirect way to redirect users and crawlers from old URL to new URL. When a webmaster needs to redirect from one URL to another for different reasons, 301 is viewed the best as it transfers most of the link juice from the old page to the new page.

55. Explain the bounce rate?

The percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action like clicking on a link, filling a form, or doing a purchase is defined as bounce rate.

If a visitor visits your website and stays but does not purchase your sports product then that will be counted as bounce rate for your website.

56. Explain header tags.

Header Tags range from <h1> to <h6> with H1 denoting the biggest and H6 denoting the smaller header.

H1 and H2 are held to be the most powerful for SEO.

It is advised to use your secondary keywords in header tags anywhere it feels reasonable and doable.

57. Explain robots.txt?

A robots.txt is a file that contains instructions for bots that inform them which web pages they can and cannot reach. Robots.txt files are most suitable for web crawlers .

58. Explain HTML sitemap?

An HTML sitemap connects your website, so it improves your internal linking for SEO objectives, building a more interconnected website.

It makes it simpler to navigate your website, it is a plus point for SEO.

59. Explain XML Sitemap.

A file that lists a website’s important pages, so that search engines can find and crawl them completely and understand the structure of your website is XML Sitemap

A sitemap can help advance content discovery.

60. Explain anchor texts?

Anchor texts are the clickable texts in a hyperlink. Anchor texts help users to know what the page is about.

It also carries SEO value if keywords are implemented. But in case of over-optimized, It might get penalized by Google.

61. Explain Title Tag?

Title tag assists Google and users to know the idea of a web page. Optimizing page title is an essential on-page practice where it’s advised to apply your primary keyword.

Also, the title tag should be suitable enough to make search engine visitants click on it and hit your web page.

A title tag for a company who sells sports goods can be “Cricket Jersey” for example.

62. Explain link building.

It is a tactic that gets web pages to link to each other by getting hyperlinks from different websites and applying them to your site.

Eg. the link to your website which said “For purchasing sports goods visit..”.

63. Why does link building matter?

Link building helps users navigate between various pages on the Internet. They also help search engines crawl within the pages of your website.

64. Explain do-follow links.

Links that can benefit you to increase Page Rank, earn much more SEO points and increase link juice which makes your site highly ranked in SERP are called Do follow links.

65. Explain no-follow links.

Links that do not affect the search engine rankings of the destination URL because Google does not give Page Rank or anchor text over them are called no follow links.

Google does not crawl no follow links.

66. Explain guest posting?

Guest posting is also known as guest blogging where bloggers write posts for various websites of the similar niche to build relationships and attract traffic to their website as well by building backlinks.

A guest blogger writes a blog titled “Cricket clothing and equipment” for your website where he mentions products of your brand but clothing of his brand then it is called guest blogging.

67. What are backlinks?

When one website is linked to another it is known as the backlink process.

If some website links your website to their page it is a backlink to your website and vice versa.

If a website has an article which talks about “Tennis clothing and equipment” where it gives a link to your brand’s tennis equipment then it is a backlink for you.

68. Define Google algorithm.

Google algorithm is a complex method that enables Google to find, rank, and return the most appropriate pages for a particular search query.

69. What according to you are the most important Google Ranking Factors.

Some most important GR factors are:

Good Quality Content

Backlinks

Search Intention

Website Loading Speed

Mobile Friendliness

DA

Keyword Optimization

70. What is a link audit?

An activity to audit the backlinks of domains is known as Link Audit. It helps you to know the type of backlinks you get plus to list backlinks you want to add in a list of harmful links.

71. How can you improve Google rankings?

Your User experience should be good.

You should write high quality content in your articles.

Try to gain backlinks and fix broken links if any

Improve page speed

Add header tags

You can write more about how your sports products are helpful, try to gain more backlinks to your brand, be specific about your headings in blogs.

3. Expert Level SEO Interview Questions & Answers

72. Define White hat SEO.

The use of approved SEO techniques and strategies by a search engine is White hat SEO.

73. Define Black hat SEO.

SEO techniques and strategies applied to get higher search rankings, and breaking search engine rules is Black hat SEO.

If Google detects that your website is using black hat seo methods then you may face a google penalty.

For instance if in an article about cricket you are stuffing keywords of your tennis products then it is a Black hat seo practice.

74. Explain PBN?

Private Blog Network is a website created on a dropped or sold domain. Some black hat SEOs develop them to link to their primary website and shift authority.

Google is fronting this way as it can uplift a spammy website so they are most often deceived by search engines.

75. Explain Google Search Console or the Webmaster tool?

Google Search Console is a free service that allows you to study great data about your website and the users who visit it.

You can use it to obtain things like how many users are visiting your site and how they are perceiving it, whether more people are visiting your site on a mobile or computer, and which pages on your site are the most popular.

It can also help you find and fix errors, submit a sitemap, and design and check a robots.txt file.

76. How to increase the frequency of crawling by search engines?

Some ways by which you can increase frequency of crawling by search engines are:

Add fresh content to your website frequently

Update your website load time

Add sitemaps to improve Google crawl rate

Fix server response time

Use relevant seo campaign

Don’t use duplicate content

Block undesired pages via Robots.txt

77. Explain a canonical URL?

Same content having duplicate links is known as Canonical links.

78. Explain TLD?

Top-Level Domain (TLD) is the concluding part of an internet address. There are many types of TLD available like .com, .net, .org, .co.in, etc.

79. Explain ccTLD?

It is a country code top-level domain. Every country has its domain extension. All ccTLDs are just two characters. For instance, .in for India, .au for Australia.

80. Explain HTTPS?

Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) is encrypted to improve the security of data transfer. This is especially crucial when users transfer sensitive data.

81. Explain schema markup?

Schema markup is the language of search engines, it uses unique semantic vocabulary. It is code used to more precisely give information to search engines to understand the content. It is also known as structured data.

82. Explain AMP?

AMP is “Accelerated Mobile Pages.”

An Open Source Framework that was started as a joint action by Google and many other technology and publishing corporations is AMP.

With AMP, it is possible to build simple mobile websites that load almost immediately.

83. Explain NAP?

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number.

NAP is one of the important aspects of Local SEO. It assists search engines to learn and identify the list of companies to be presented for particular location-based searches.

84. Explain Rankbrain?

Rankbrain is a search engine algorithm. It helps Google to prepare search results and give more relevant search results for users.

85. Explain the BERT algorithm?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations. It helps Google with a deep learning algorithm for NLP. Natural language Processing helps Google to know the meaning of the sentence like a human.

86. Explain Disavow Tool.

It is a Google Search Console Tool to enable publishers to communicate to Google that some links from other domains should not be recognized and should be shunned.

It eases the websites to avoid any activities based on bad links. But, the tool should be managed very precisely and if not used with caution, it can harm the website performance.

87. How can we improve the landing page quality?

To improve landing page quality we can:

Use authentic and appealing content on landing pages

Define Unique Point to visitors instantly

Include trust signals

Keep message precise and consistent with ad and landing page

88. Explain Google’s Rich Answer Box?

Google’s way of assisting the users to obtain the answer to their questions without clicking any website is Google’s rich answer box. You can spot these when searching for weather news, distance, cricket score, unit alterations, calculators, text-based results, and more.

89. Explain Google Panda?

Google Panda lowers the rank of “low-quality sites” specially “content farms”, and delivers higher-quality sites to the top of the search results.

90. Explain Google Penguin?

Google Penguin finds spammy backlinks and devalues or penalizes. it finds link farms, buying links, blog networks, and each black hat link building method.

91. Explain Google Hummingbird?

Google Hummingbird searches more about context and more limited about keywords. It helps Google to know the intention of the keywords better and not just keywords.

92. How can we decrease the loading time of the website?

We can decrease the loading time of the website by:

Optimize Images

Compact and Optimize Content

Insert Style-sheet References at the Top

Put JavaScript and CSS in External Files

Lessen 301 Redirects

93. Explain Cloaking.

Cloaking applies to the practice of exhibiting different content or URLs to users and search engines. It is a black-hat SEO practice.

94. Explain Forum Posting.

Forum posting is an off-page procedure where you build a profile on a suitable forum, design a thread, join with other users, engage in online discussions to get backlinks to your site.

95. Explain RSS Feed.

RSS Stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is the method of submitting RSS feeds to the RSS submission directory. It is suitable for users to get renewed on various blogs, websites, and news from a particular location.

96. How is Page rank and Search engine result page different from each other?

Page rank is a Google algorithm. It is a metric for measuring the performance of the webpage presented by webmasters to the search engines. Google stopped showing the page rank to the world.

SERP lists the pages that correlate to any query done by the user. These results incorporate both organic search and paid results. SERPs results hold some positions, and they are not random positions.

The ranking positions are decided by the search engines using complex algorithms, and Page rank is one of them.

97. Explain Doorway Pages.

Doorway pages are a black hat method that should be avoided. They are the pages search engines users visit first after clicking a search engine result before opening the real landing page. 

They are optimized for search engines and once the user hits the doorway pages they are automatically redirected to the actual landing page.

98. Does directory submission still work?

Directory submission is an off-page SEO technique still getting used by some companies.

It runs only if your business is getting listed on general directory websites where people really look for businesses. Seeding the website into dozens of websites just to get backlinks is an aged concept that should be avoided.

You can present your website to a niche-relevant directory for mention if it’s a local business.

99. Explain Press Release Submission in SEO.

Press releases submission is a method of writing newsworthy content like new announcements, parties, new hires, etc and submits them to big PR sites for building links and to improve the visibility of the website. To make sure they announce it, the content has to be engaging and meaningful.

100. Explain Search Engine Submission?

Search engine submission is the method of submitting your website to popular search engines to assure it gets crawled and indexed.

But, this process is not required anymore as bots are way smarter and can locate your website and list easily without you requiring to submit it to them manually.

Final Thoughts about SEO interview Questions

This complete guide to SEO interview questions and answers is what you need to go through before you go for your job interview. Your viable ability will also help you to pass the interview. These interview questions are just a quick revision of what you previously knew.

With great preparation, best approaches, and receptiveness to the market, you can cultivate the necessary potential. Digital Marketing experience is in like manner the best strategy for going into outsourcing, live try, or a job!

FAQs

How to prepare for SEO interview questions?

If you want to prepare for interview questions you can go through this set of guide which makes you understand SEO better.

How to learn SEO?

If you want to explore and become a SEO specialist , check out DSIM’s Certified SEO program and become an expert in SEO.

How to learn more about Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a huge field. It has a lot of aspects like SEO,SMM,SEM, Web analytics and more.

You can join DSIM’s Certified Digital Marketing Master program and get trained by experts and enhance your skills in this sector.

What are the latest updates about Google?

Every month Google adds new updates like recently Google dropped Safe Browsing as a Page experience ranking factor and Google is rolling out Core web vitals score for all websites indexed on google search engine.

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Sakshi V
Enthusiastic about Marketing with knowledge of Digital marketing and WordPress. Creative Marketing professional bringing experience creating blogs and content marketing.

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