We skipped the post about the November update, as we were working on a big update in Site Monitoring. Therefore, this time the list of updates will be combined: for November and December together.
1. Site-level checks in Site Audit
Previously, Site Audit could only report issues at the page level. We have added a new block of checks – Site-level issues. Here we check for availability of:
- XML sitemap;
- robots.txt file;
- favicon;
- 404 server response when requesting a non-existent page;
- redirect between www / non-www;
- redirect between http / https versions of the site.
You will also see an error if there are less than 30 days left before your domain registration expires. If there are no such errors on the site, then the Site-level issues block will be rolled up. In the future, we plan to add new checks to this block. If you already have ideas on your mind, add them here.
2. One-time Site Audit and internal currency
One-time site audit is available among other Extra tools. It provides value in two ways:
- You need to conduct a site audit quickly, you do not want to waste time on creating a project and do not plan to track the site’s positions or site’s changes.
- You need to save the site audit data. In a standard Site Audit, audit data is constantly overwritten and you cannot view past reports. In a one-time tool, each audit is saved and you can return to this data at any time and upload it.
This type of audit is especially useful for site migrations or major site updates.
Together with this tool, we are introducing Sitechecker’s internal currency. Now one site audit costs 10 credits or $1. We have awarded all paying users 20 credits, so you can painlessly try the tool in action.
Currently, one-time Site Audit and the use of credits are available only for users with an active subscription. Perhaps in future updates, we will give the opportunity to make such one-time transactions for all users.
Internal currency can be topped up on your profile page.
3. More settings to control the crawler
Clients sometimes come to us with a problem that the Sitechecker robot overloads the site during crawling and leads to the fact that the site becomes unavailable. We have created a short instruction on how to manage our bot and added the ability to reduce the crawling speed in the Site Audit settings.
Also, you can now customize crawling even more flexibly: add all links from subdomains to the report, or exclude links with parameters, nofollow, or links to pages closed from the indexing.
4. View errors in code for more issues in Site Audit
Added one-click view of problems in the code for a number of errors:
- Page referenced for more than one language in hreflang;
- HTML lang attribute invalid;
- Hreflang annotation invalid;
- Has link with a URL referencing LocalHost or 127.0.0.1;
- Has link with a URL referencing a local or UNC file path;
- Has outgoing hreflang annotations using relative URLs;
- Open Graph URL not matching canonical;
- Missing alt text;
- HTTPS page links to HTTP image;
- HTTPS page links to HTTP JavaScript;
- HTTPS page links to HTTP CSS;
- Canonical is a relative URL;
- Meta robots found outside of <head>.
5. New design of Site Monitoring
Site Monitoring has changed not only visually.
We added the ability to view period not only for the day, but also weekly, monthly, quarterly. And with the new calendar, you will be able to select the required period for analysis much faster.
6. Filtering events and pages in Site Monitoring
Filtering by events and pages allows you to expand the capabilities of the analysis of changes. Now you can easily analyze the history of all changes on the page or study how often your robots.txt was changed or links were removed. When you work on the site yourself, it is pretty useful, and when you delegate promotion to employees or contractors, it becomes invaluable.
We also significantly accelerated loading data in Site Monitoring. Turn on monitoring as soon as you create a project to start collecting data on changes right away. In the future, we will expand the number of changes we record and use them to form tasks for the site.
7. New blog page design
The font, indents, design of some elements have changed. According to my feelings, reading the text has become easier and more pleasant. I would love to hear your feedback.
8. Instructions for connecting Google Analytics
Google has announced a big update – a new version of Google Analytics. The old version is called Universal Analytics, the new one is Google Analytics 4.
The new version radically changed the approach to data collection, added automatic tracking of valuable events (first session, downloading files, watching videos), but many valuable reports from the old version have disappeared and the API of the new version is still poorly developed.
We have created a guide on how to fix any issue when connecting Google Analytics. We plan to launch support for the new version in 2021.
9. Two video guides on YouTube
Chris Hawkes published a video guide on how to use Sitechecker in English and Flavio Muniz published a video guide in Portuguese.
10. Plans for 2021
In 2020, we have strengthened the customer support department, carried out a large-scale product redesign and increased the stability of the product. Our goal for 2021 in the form of a slogan sounds like this – more speed, more insights.
We’ve added new product development suggestions to our public backlog. Vote on the features you like and add your ideas.
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube to stay informed about product updates and our new research.
