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#1 Search Engine Ranking Factor: SEO QA

October 8th, 2007 · 23 Comments

In April of 2007, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org published the results of a survey of top SEOs regarding what they believed were the top search engine ranking factors. It was pretty interesting stuff, but something happened recently that reminded me that all of these top SEOs totally missed the boat - none of them mentioned the most important search engine ranking factor of them all - QA.

No SEO QA Traffic Graph

QA (aka “Quality Assurance”) is the process by which you check all of the work done on your website before you release it to the rest of the world, including the search engines. QA is hard enough to do on “normal” feature releases, but for some reason whenever there is SEO involved it gets even harder, usually because the team has not adopted SEO as a part of its everyday process. Screwing up QA on SEO features can mean losing a lot if not all of your traffic in the flick of a switch.

Here’s a perfect example: I noticed one of my clients’ Google traffic take an almost 50% dive from two days before and asked what they had done to the site. They told me “nothing”, but when I looked at the robots.txt file, I saw they had rewritten it in such a way that it blocked Google from crawling the entire site. I quickly alerted them and they corrected the problem, but had I not been looking, they probably would have lost a lot more traffic for a lot longer. The problem was that some of the developers were not following the SEO QA process I had given them. As the CEO later told me, this could have been “an enormous tragedy” for their business.

So say what you will about title tags and external links, I say SEO QA is the #1 search engine ranking factor.

Here’s my standard SEO QA checklist for your enjoyment. Feel free to add more SEO QA ideas in the comments section.

The Local SEO Guide SEO QA Checklist

The following items should be tested before every new release:

  1. For dynamic pages does each page type have a unique Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tag formula?
  2. For static pages does each page have a unique Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tag?
  3. Inspect your robots.txt file and make sure that only URLs that you don’t want the search engines to see are listed. Examples of pages you probably don’t want indexed include login, email to a friend, printer friendly pages, most footer pages, etc. If you see “Disallow: /”, this means you are blocking all robots from crawling the entire site. This is not good.
  4. Run a report of all dynamic page types that have a “noindex” tag and confirm that only page types that you don’t want the search engines to see have this tag.
  5. Test all URL redirects. Make sure the following redirects are in place
    1. Non-www version of every URL 301s to www version (or vice-versa)
    2. URLs that end in / 301 to version that has no / (or vice-versa)
    3. All mixed case URLs 301 to lowercase versions
    4. Test version subdomains (e.g. alpha.site.com) either 301 to root domain or else are password protected.
  6. Make sure any URLs that are being eliminated 301 to the new version of the URL or if there is no new version that they 301 redirect to the root domain or a related directory on the site.
  7. If you are using a sitemaps xml file to update Google, Yahoo & MSN sitemaps has the xml file been updated to reflect the new changes?
  8. Run a crawler against your site such as Linkscan to make sure that your pages are not delivering error codes and to see if there are any chain redirects (e.g. 301 to 301 to 301). Avoid chain redirects if possible.
  9. Create a list of items that have changed that could affect SEO to help quickly diagnose any issues that may result from the new release. Typical items include:
    1. Addition of or reduction of links on a page
    2. Rewritten page copy and meta information
    3. Addition of new pages
    4. Eliminated URLs
    5. Redirected URLs

Tags: Search Engine Ranking Factors

23 responses so far ↓

  • 1 g1smd // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    Good post.

    I also added a few more factors that I check for, in a list at: http://sphinn.com/story/8761/

  • 2 cctech // Oct 14, 2007 at 7:44 am

    Great list, Andrew. And great job helping your client avoid a potential Internet disaster!

  • 3 One Scary Month In Local Search Blogging // Oct 31, 2007 at 10:48 am

    [...] 2. #1 Search Engine Ranking Factor: SEO QA [...]

  • 4 Everybody’s Free (To Add Good Content) - Hobo SEO UK // Jan 4, 2008 at 12:40 pm

    [...] Be kind to your unique page titles and descriptions, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. [...]

  • 5 Bon // Feb 26, 2008 at 11:42 pm

    It is necessary to have unique meta descriptions in every pages? And the links how many links really to a certain… And how can we position ourselves int the ranking…..

  • 6 sunita aggarwal // Mar 23, 2008 at 11:50 pm

    Hi
    I am very confused.I am in India and my client is in USA.When I search the cli8ent site on google.com and yahoo.com on NASCAR clothes keyword that show on first page.But my client said to me that that is not on first page.I want to know the reason why we see it on different location.What i do for this that will show on same location in INDIA andUSA.How I promote it that will locate on same location on google.com and yahoo.com in India and USA
    Can u help me for find out the reason of this diofference?

    Thanks

  • 7 Andrew Shotland // Mar 24, 2008 at 8:55 am

    Hi Sunita,

    The short answer is that you probably will need relevant inbound links from both US and Indian sites, but it could be more complicated than that depending on what’s going on with your site.

    A

  • 8 Zosap Internet Marketing // May 21, 2008 at 12:36 am

    As far as i am aware of Local SEO, the most counted factor is whois information and IP from where you upload the pages.

  • 9 Chiropractic Websites // Jun 14, 2008 at 2:31 am

    Excellent list there, I am glad I came across it as I had done a 301 redirect only for http:// to http://www but noticed there are several I could utilise.

    I use a fantastic tool http://www.websitegrader.com to help me with my SEO. Its by the guys at Hubspot and was the original reason for me doing the 301 redirect.

  • 10 Oteller // Jul 23, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Great list, Andrew. And great job helping your client avoid a potential Internet disaster!

  • 11 Trezora Glass // Aug 10, 2008 at 9:39 am

    Andrew,

    GREAT comment. I’ve worked in the high tech industry for years and spent quite a few at a company called National Instruments. They sell hardware and software products for the test and measurement industry. I can tell you that QA is absolutely critical to the success of a software, or any other kind of product.

    I guess I never thought of SEO which is a service as a product that requires QA, but you are absolutely right. there are so many fly-by-night companies offering SEO (ask me how I know) that having a QA program in place would really help differentiate the tops from the nots.

    Mendy

  • 12 David // Aug 20, 2008 at 1:30 am

    Hi Andrew,

    I just started my first wordpress blog and I’m not really sure if it matches up to the checklist you provided (which seems to be a great yardstick with which to measure a site’s SEO).

    Do you know if Wordpress automatically 301s all www to non-www’s?

  • 13 Andrew Shotland // Aug 21, 2008 at 8:19 am

    Hi David,

    I am pretty sure version 2.6 does. There are also some plugins that will do it for you. Here’s one:
    http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

  • 14 Andrew Shotland // Aug 28, 2008 at 9:48 am

    Eva,

    Google can show different results based on your location. The short answer is that you are accessing different servers known as “data centers” depending on where you are located. Google also tries to deliver more locally relevant content based on your location as well.

    A

  • 15 dhurowitz // Sep 24, 2008 at 8:47 am

    Andrew:

    Good article, even as we approach the one year anniversary of it’s posting the information is still valuable and relevant. Am interested to see how universal search will mix with local, and how the addition of similar variables will make for much more complex ranking algorithms and SEO.

  • 16 Andrew Shotland // Sep 24, 2008 at 9:11 am

    Muchas gracias d!

    No matter what the algorithm is, seo qa will always be at the top of the search engine ranking factors list.

  • 17 Jeff Melvin // Sep 24, 2008 at 11:47 am

    Great checklist and gave me a good resource to build upon as I work in my local community as a local search marketer.

  • 18 An Open Letter To Kamikaze Web Developers // Dec 18, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    [...] Update Your Internet Yellow Pages Listing For Free Yelp SEO Analysis Part One The SEO Friendly CMS #1 Search Engine Ranking Factor: SEO QA Facebook Pages & Local Search Engine [...]

  • 19 Charles // Feb 12, 2009 at 9:34 pm

    Interesting that I should find this article. Just a couple weeks ago after having a guy upgrade my WP blog to the latest version my traffic started to tank. After a couple days I realized I had a robots.txt blocking all engines. I fixed it and my rankings/traffic jumped to normal within a couple days - just like in your graph.

    Google giveth and Google taketh away ;-)

  • 20 Mike // Mar 5, 2009 at 11:56 am

    I do believe that every page of your site, whether it is static or dynamic, should have its own specific Title and Description. As for the keyword meta tag, I don’t use it at all seems more like a waste of time for me.

  • 21 Lee // Mar 29, 2009 at 10:27 am

    This is the first time I have ever heard anyone mention anything like QA. I also follow QA but only after learning the hard way many times. I now know that taking short cuts is simply just too costly.

    Good article!

  • 22 Kev Jaques // Apr 7, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    Hi Andrew

    Good list, shame bigger teams don’t use code reviews and then run it through their team lead prior to other testing.
    Would cut down on a lot of silly code being put to QA, Live.
    It may take a little longer but the quality is there and less come backs.
    But isn’t the saying “There is never enough time to get the job done, but plenty of time to go back and fix things?” heheh.
    I’m sure most of us have been there ;)

  • 23 Andrew Shotland // Apr 7, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    I am there right now Kev!

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