# SEO QA

Category: [Monitoring & Alerts](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/monitoring-alerts/) › [Types of monitoring](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/monitoring-alerts/types-of-monitoring/) · Also known as: SEO regression, quality assurance

**SEO QA** (quality assurance for SEO) is the systematic check of changes to a website for effects on search visibility. It usually runs before a release and is repeated after go-live.

## What is checked?

The scope depends on the project. Practice articles commonly list these areas.

- crawlability and indexability: robots.txt, meta robots and canonical tags, status codes
- titles, meta descriptions, headings and other content changes
- internal links and navigation
- the XML sitemap
- structured data
- rendering on JavaScript sites
- mobile parity and tracking code

Teams often assign severity levels, and critical findings stop a release (example from checklists, not a standard). Checks run on a staging environment first, covering key pages and templates.

## Why check after go-live?

Errors also arise later, through new releases, configuration changes or plugin updates. A single check before launch does not catch these, so some teams add regular crawls or monitoring.

## Example

A test noindex stays on the product pages by mistake. According to Google, the tag removes a page from search results, but only if the page is not blocked by robots.txt, because otherwise the crawler never sees the tag. The example is invented.

## Related terms

- [Staging environment](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/staging-environment/index.md)
- [Staging crawl](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/staging-crawl/index.md)
- [Website relaunch](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-relaunch/index.md)
- [SEO audit](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/seo-audit/index.md)
- [noindex](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/noindex/index.md)
- [SEO monitoring](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/seo-monitoring/index.md)

## Sources

- [Block indexing with noindex - Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing)
- [Defining your website's SEO quality assurance suite - The Gray Company (secondary)](https://thegray.company/blog/defining-your-websites-seo-quality-assurance-suite-qa-for-seo)

---

Last updated: October 7, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/seo-qa/