Our Methodology

Why We Publish Our Methodology

Most SEO tools are proprietary black boxes. You get a score and a marketing pitch — but no way to verify what was measured or why. We think that is bad for the industry. RankifyPro publishes every threshold, every rule, and every primary source, so you can decide for yourself whether the score is meaningful for your context.

Audit Pipeline (Step by Step)

1. Receive the URL via HTTPS POST to /tool.php with X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest.
2. Validate URL format. If missing scheme, prepend https://. If invalid, return an error.
3. Issue a single HTTP GET via PHP file_get_contents with a 10-second timeout, following up to 5 redirects, with User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; RankifyPro/1.0; +https://rankifypro.com).
4. Record wall-clock time from request send to response received in milliseconds (this is the Page Load Speed metric).
5. Parse the HTML into a DOM via PHP DOMDocument with libxml warnings suppressed.
6. Run 12 XPath queries (one per check) against the DOM.
7. Award points: pass = 10, warn = 5, fail = 0. Informational checks are not counted in the denominator.
8. Compute final score = (sum of awarded points) / (sum of max possible points) × 100, rounded to the nearest integer.
9. Return JSON: { url, score, checks[], load_time }.
10. Discard the URL, HTML, and DOM from memory.

Check-by-Check Reference

1. Title Tag

XPath: //title. Primary source: Google Search Central — Title Link best practices.

Condition	Status	Points
Length 40–65 characters	PASS	10
Length outside 40–65 but > 0	WARN	5
Missing	FAIL	0

2. Meta Description

XPath: //meta[@name="description"]/@content. Primary source: Google Search Central — Snippets.

Condition	Status	Points
Length 120–160 characters	PASS	10
Length outside 120–160 but > 0	WARN	5
Missing	FAIL	0

3. H1 Heading

XPath: //h1. Primary source: web.dev — Headings & sections.

Condition	Status	Points
Exactly 1 H1	PASS	10
More than 1 H1	WARN	5
No H1	FAIL	0

4. H2 Headings

Condition	Status	Points
≥ 2 H2 elements	PASS	10
Exactly 1 H2	WARN	5
No H2	FAIL	0

5. Image Alt Text

XPath: //img. We inspect the alt attribute. Empty-string alts (alt="") are treated as present (the explicit decorative declaration). Only entirely-missing or whitespace-only alts are counted as missing.

Condition	Status	Points
No images on page	INFO	Not scored
100% of images have alt text	PASS	10
Some but not all have alt text	WARN	5
0% of images have alt text	FAIL	0

6. Mobile Viewport

XPath: //meta[@name="viewport"]. Primary source: Google Search Central — Mobile-first indexing.

7. Canonical Tag

XPath: //link[@rel="canonical"]/@href. Primary source: Google Search Central — Consolidate duplicate URLs.

8. Page Load Speed

Measures TTFB of the HTML document only — not full-page Core Web Vitals. For LCP, FID, INP, CLS use PageSpeed Insights.

Condition	Status	Points
< 800 ms	PASS	10
800–2000 ms	WARN	5
> 2000 ms	FAIL	0

9. Keyword Density

We strip HTML, lowercase the visible text, split on whitespace, and count occurrences of every word longer than 4 characters. Healthy density: 1%–3%. Above 3% may look like keyword stuffing. Below 1% is informational only.

10. HTTPS / SSL

We inspect the URL scheme after redirects. Primary source: Google Search Central blog — HTTPS as a ranking signal (2014).

11. Open Graph Tags

XPath: //meta[@property="og:title"]/@content. Primary source: ogp.me — the Open Graph Protocol specification.

12. Robots Meta

XPath: //meta[@name="robots"]/@content. Primary source: Google Search Central — Robots meta tag.

What the Tool Does Not Check (Yet)

• Backlinks (off-page authority)
• Full Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) — use PageSpeed Insights
• JSON-LD schema validation — use Google’s Rich Results Test
• hreflang for international sites
• XML sitemap presence and validity
• Internal link graph
• JavaScript-rendered content (we audit the raw HTML response, the same as Googlebot’s first pass)

Versioning & Updates

We review the scoring rules quarterly against any updates to Google’s Search Central documentation and web.dev recommendations. The current rule version is v1.2 (effective 2026-06-11). Material changes will be summarised here with the date of effect.

Report a Methodology Issue

If you spot what you believe is an inaccurate threshold or stale citation, please email support@rankifypro.com. We acknowledge methodology reports within 7 days and publish a correction (if confirmed) within 30 days.