Eugene Serbin

Role

Eugene Serbin is Head of SEO at SEMALT. He is responsible for the audit methodology behind OurSEO Tools: which checks exist, what each one measures, how heavily it counts towards the score, and what the report recommends when it fails.

Experience

Eugene has worked in SEO since 2006: twenty years of hands-on search work at Ukrainian and international companies, most recently as Head of SEO at SEMALT. He is also the author of SEO Study, the free SEO course on this site.

What he is responsible for here

• The 69-point weighted checklist across nine sections — indexation, URLs and duplicates, status codes, rendering and speed, security, on-page, internal linking, content, local and social.
• The 40-point E-E-A-T review built on Google’s four pillars, including the rule that YMYL sites are held to a stricter standard than the rest.
• Page-level content scoring — completeness, readability, spelling, relevance to the queries a page actually ranks for, and uniqueness within the site.
• Calibration — deciding what counts as a real finding. Checks are tested against live sites, and any that produce false positives are corrected or removed rather than left to argue with the client.

How the methodology is kept honest

Three rules govern the audit, and they are his:

• Measure, do not estimate. A check that cannot run is reported as not checked. No score is filled in from a guess.
• Judge the site the way a search engine does. The crawler obeys robots.txt with the same grouping rules Googlebot applies, follows redirects to their real destination, and reads the whole site rather than the homepage.
• A false positive is our defect, not the client’s. When a finding turns out to be wrong, the check is fixed in the engine so it stops being wrong for everyone else too.

Areas of expertise

Technical SEO for large and multilingual sites, indexation and crawl control, E-E-A-T assessment, content quality evaluation, and search performance analysis using Google Search Console data.