Last updated: 30 October 2026
Who is responsible
The course and the audit methodology are authored and edited by Eugene Serbin, Head of SEO at Semalt, who has worked in SEO since 2006. He decides what each lesson covers, what it recommends, and approves every lesson before it is published.
Where the facts come from
Lessons are built on primary sources: Google Search Central documentation, Search Console Help, Google Ads and Analytics Help, web.dev, and the official documentation of other providers when a lesson covers them (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Bing, schema.org or the Open Graph protocol). Every lesson ends with a list of the pages it relies on and the date they were last checked.
Lessons separate two kinds of statements:
- What a provider says. Shown as a quotation, attributed and linked. These are the provider’s exact words.
- What practitioners do. Advice from SEO practice is written as practice, never put in a search engine’s mouth.
How lessons are produced
- Plan. Each lesson starts from a brief: the topic, the questions it must answer, and the official pages to use.
- Draft with AI assistance. Drafts and diagrams are prepared with the help of AI tools working from that brief and from the collected source text. AI speeds up writing; it is not the source of any fact.
- Automatic quote check. Before publication, a script downloads every source page and checks that each quotation in the lesson appears there word for word. A quote that is not found is fixed or removed.
- Review and approval. Eugene Serbin reviews the lesson for accuracy and usefulness and approves it before it goes live.
Diagrams and examples
Diagrams explain mechanisms. Where a chart or screenshot mock-up uses numbers, they are example data and are labelled as illustrative. Example sites use the reserved domain example.com.
Updates and corrections
Search engines change their documentation and features. When a source changes, the affected lessons are updated and the “Updated” date changes with them; the date never changes without a real change to the content. If you find a mistake, write to us with the lesson URL. Confirmed errors are corrected promptly.
Independence
SEO Study is free and has no paid placements. Third-party SEO tools are described by category, not promoted. Lessons may point to the free OurSEO Tools audit where it checks the issue being discussed; Semalt, which runs this site, sells SEO services.
The audit methodology
The same principles apply to the audit: every check is published in the methodology, a check that cannot run is reported as not checked, and a confirmed false positive is fixed in the engine. More about the service is on the About page.