Console documentation

Overview

This page is the complete documentation of the SEO4Ajax console. This documentation is divided into five main parts describing:

• the home page,
• the site status page,
• the site SEO reports page,
• the site dashboard page,
• the site settings page.

Home page

This page is the first page to be displayed when you're logged in. It allows:

• registering a new site in SEO4Ajax,
• viewing and configuring the registered sites,
• changing the account settings,
• managing your subscription.

Home page

• At any time during the navigation, click on the SEO4Ajax logo 1 to go back to the home page

• Click on the "Documentation" link 2 to go to the index of the documentation

• Click on the "Account settings" link 3 to go to the Account settings page

• Click on the "Subscription" link 4 to go to the Subscription page

• Click on the "Sign out" link 5 to log out from the console

• Press one of the site button 6 to open the Site status page of the corresponding site

• The status icon 7 shows the status of the crawler for the corresponding site. This status can be changed in the Site status page and has two states:

• the "play" icon means the crawler is active for this site

  • the "pause" icon means the crawler is inactive

• Press the "Add a new site" button 8 to register a new site

• Click on the Grid/List icons 9 to switch from the grid view to the list view and vice-versa

New site registration

This popup is displayed when you press the "Add a new site" button in the Home page. It allows registering a new site in SEO4Ajax.

Site configuration popup

• Type a unique name for the site 1, this name will be displayed in the Home page and in the header of the Site status page
• Type the URL of the site 2
• Select a plan 3 if needed. The price of the selected plan is displayed below the input field 4
• Click on the link 5 to display the Pricing page
• Confirm the configuration by pressing the "Add a new site" button 6. Once the site added, the Site settings page is displayed in order to launch the first crawl

Credit card details popup

This popup is displayed when you press the "Add a new site" button in the Site configuration popup, and a paid plan has been selected but the credit card details have never been saved. The form allows registering your credit card details.

Credit card details popup

• Type your credit card number 1
• Type the credit card verification code 2
• Type the credit card expiration date 3
• Type the card owner name 4
• Type the card owner full address 5
• Type your company VAT identifier 6 if you are located in Europe
• The price of the selected plan 7 is displayed below the VAT identifier input field
• Press the "Confirm subscription" button 8 to save the credit card details and the plan subscription. Once registered, the Site settings page is displayed in order to launch the first crawl.

Account settings

This page is displayed when you click on the "Account settings" link in the header of the Home page. It allows modifying your email address and the password used to identify yourself in the console. It also allows registering the credit card details, setting the billing address, and viewing past or upcoming invoices.

Credentials

• Type your new email address 1
• Type your new password 2
• Confirm your new password 3
• Press the "Save" button 4 to save the new settings
• Press the "Switch to ..." button 5 to access the account another user shared with you (or to switch back to your account)
• The API token is read-only 6, it is used to request the SEO4Ajax authenticated API

Site status

This page is displayed when you press the button of any site in the Home page or click on the "status" link of the header. It allows:

• activating/deactivating the crawler
• viewing and filtering captures, errors and paths being captured
• adding paths to capture
• downloading the generated sitemap
• deleting captures
• debugging capture issues

Common elements

These elements are common to "captures", "errors", "pendings" and "logs" views.

Common elements

• Click on the "captures", "errors", "pendings" or "logs" tab 1 to display the corresponding view
• Press the "active/paused" switch button 2 to activate or deactivate the crawler
• Select the number of results 3 displayed in the current view
• Click on the menu icon 4 to open the contextual menu of the current view
• Click on a column header 5 to sort results
• Click on the link icon 6 to open the URL in a new tab
• Click on the "+" icon 7 to view detailed information about a capture
• Navigate through the the results by clicking on any pagination link 8

Site status - captures

This view is displayed when you click on the "captures" tab. It displays all the paths captured by the crawler with their capture date, and allows previewing captures.

Captures view

• The total number of captures is displayed next to the tab label 1
• The capture date of the page 2 is displayed for each path
• Click on the "camera" icon 3 to open the preview of a capture in a new tab

Site status - errors

This view shows all the errors detected by the crawler with their request date and the corresponding error type.

Errors view

• The total number of errors is displayed next to the tab label 1
• The request date of the error 2 is displayed for each path
• The type of the error 3 is displayed for each path

Here are the possible values for the "error type" column:

• HTTP (<code>) an HTTP error occurred
• blank page the body of the page is empty
• unresponsive the page rendering (i.e. the UI thread) was unresponsive
• net. error a network error occurred when retrieving the page
• invalid mime type the MIME type of the capture is not one of these: "application/xhtml+xml", "application/xml", "text/html"
• timeout expired the maximum delay allowed to capture the page (150s) has been reached
• quota error the maximum number of captures allowed by the plan has been reached
• tech. error a technical error occurred
• max. retry an unknown error occurred

Site status - pendings

This view is displayed when you click on the "pendings" tab. It displays all the pages currently being processed by the crawler with their status.

Pendings view

• The total number of paths being processed is displayed next to the tab label 1
• The status 2 is displayed for each path

Here are the possible values for the "status" column:

• pending the path is queued and ready to be captured
• processing the path is currently being captured
• pausing the path is currently being captured and the crawler is going to be inactive
• paused the capture is paused

Site status - logs

This view displays the saved logs of pages captured by the crawler. You must capture path(s) manually through the Capture paths popup and check the "activate debug logs" option to activate and save the logs.

Logs view

• Click on the "i" icon 1 to view the logs of a capture

Site status - cache freshness

This view shows statistics about the freshness of the cache for captures, redirects, errors and pending captures.

Cache freshness view

• A bar chart shows the distribution of cached pages by number of past days 1
• Type a date period 2 to only display data for this period
• Click on any bar to open the captures view and list the corresponding captures 3
• A bar chart shows the distribution of cached redirects by number of past days 4
• Type a date period 5 to only display data for this period
• Check the options to filter the type of redirects displayed in the chart 6
• Click on any bar to open the captures view and list the corresponding redirects 7
• A bar chart shows the distribution of cached errors by number of past days 8
• Type a date period 9 to only display data for this period
• Check the options to filter the type of errors displayed in the chart 10
• Click on any bar to open the errors view and list the corresponding errors 11
• A bar chart shows the distribution of pending captures freshness by number of past days 12
• Type a date period 13 to only display data for this period
• Click on any bar to open the pendings view and list the corresponding pending captures 14

Site status - contextual menu

This menu allows:

• displaying search filters
• selecting all URLs from the displayed status view
• capturing selected, filtered or new paths
• deleting existing captures
• downloading the generated sitemap(s)

Contextual menu

• Click on the "Display search filters" entry 1 to display the filters panel
• Click on the "Hide search filters" entry 2 to hide the filters panel
• Click on the "Select all displayed paths" entry 3 to select all checkboxes from the current status view
• Click on the "Expand all displayed paths" entry 4 to display the detail of all statuses of the current status view
• Click on the "Re-capture all filtered paths..." entry 5 to open the Capture all filtered paths popup and capture all the filtered paths
• Click on the "Re-capture all paths..." entry 6 to open the Capture all paths popup and capture all the paths
• Click on the "Re-capture selected paths..." entry 7 to open the Capture paths popup prefilled with the selected paths
• Click on the "Capture new paths..." entry 8 to open the Capture paths popup with an empty list
• Click on the "Delete all filtered paths..." entry 9 to open the Delete all filtered paths popup and delete all the filtered paths
• Click on the "Delete selected paths..." entry 10 to open the Delete selected paths popup and delete the selected paths
• Click on the "Delete all paths..." entry 11 to open the Delete all paths popup and delete all the paths
• Click on the "Download the sitemap" entry 12 to open the Download sitemap popup and download the sitemap file(s) of the site
• Click on the "Export data as CSV" entry 13 to download the complete list of captures, errors or pending captures and their related data (e.g. capture date).

Filters

This panel allows filtering the displayed results in the current status view.

Filters panel

• Type a path 1 to display the corresponding results (you can use wildcards "*" and append "-example" to exclude paths containing 'example')
• Type a date period 2 to only display the results for this period
• Choose the redirect status 3 to display the results with or without redirects
• Press the "Filter" button 4 to display the filtered results

Capture paths popup

This popup allows capturing a list of paths.

Capture paths popup

• Type a path 1 and press the "+" button 2 to add a path to capture
• Click on the edit icon 3 to edit a path
• Click on the delete icon 4 to remove a path from the list
• Select the priority 5 at which the paths should be crawled
• Select one of the following options 6 to configure the crawl:
  • Do not crawl descendant paths option captures only the paths in the list
  • Crawl descendant paths option captures paths in the list and all the inner links
• Check the "activate debug logs" option 7 to save debug logs for these paths, the logs can be viewed in the logs view
• Press the "Capture" button 8 to confirm the action

Site SEO reports

Refreshed twice a day, the SEO reports aim to give you hints about technical SEO issues which may affect your website.

SEO reports

The monitored metrics are:

• Duplicate contents 1
• Duplicate titles 2
• Word count 3
• JavaScript errors 4
• Broken links 5
• Missing hreflang links 6

In addition to the summaries for each of the monitored metrics, the overview displays information about the structure of your website through the number of:

• analyzed pages 7
• inner links 8
• pages having a canonical link 9
• inner redirects 10

Duplicate contents

Duplicate contents refer to two or more pages having the same text content in their body tag.

Duplicate contents report

This view lists groups of duplicate contents, identified by the path of a page from each group 1, and displays the number of duplicates in each group 2. The list of pages having the same content is displayed when clicking on the right arrow 3.

Duplicate contents are often due to:

• Useless query parameter, e.g. utm_* tracking parameters
• Unmanaged soft 404
• Case sensitivity issue, e.g. example.com/home and example.com/HOME are two different URLs

Duplicate titles

Duplicate titles refer to two or more pages having the same content in their title tag, or no content at all (identified by the string "[empty title]").

Duplicate titles report

This view lists the groups of duplicate titles 1 and displays the number of pages in each group 2. The list of pages having the same title is displayed when clicking on the right arrow 3.

Pages with low word count

Word count refers to the number of words present in the body tag of a page.

Pages with low word count report

This view displays groups of words number 1 and the number of pages in each group 2. The list of pages for a given group is displayed when clicking on the right arrow 3.

JavaScript errors

JavaScript errors refer to pages having at least one JavaScript error raised during the capture process. A JavaScript error on a page may indicate there is a rendering issue on this page.

Pages with JavaScript errors

Broken links

Broken links refer to inner links pointing to pages detected as 4xx errors by the SEO4Ajax crawler.

Broken links report

This view lists the destination pages of broken links 1 and the number of source pages having at least one broken link 2.

Missing hreflang links

The <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="..."> tag allows to indicate to bots that the content of a page is available for alternate languages and/or regions.

Missing hreflang links report

This view lists the pages with missing confirmation links 1 and the number of pages having a hreflang link pointing to them 2. This list of pages with hreflang links is displayed when clicking on the right arrow 3.

Site dashboard

This page allows viewing statistics about website traffic coming from bots.

Dashboard page

• Type a date period 1 to only display the data for this period
• A pie chart shows the distribution of hits by HTTP status code 2
• A bar chart shows the number of hits by bots 3 (logarithmic scale)
• A line chart shows the mean response time by HTTP status code 8
• Press the "Refresh" button to apply the filters 12

Site settings

This page allows configuring options of the crawler.

Site settings page

• The site name 1 will be displayed in the Home page and in the header of the Site status page
• The site URL 2 is read-only
• The site token is read-only 3, it is used to get captures through the SEO4Ajax public API
• Click on the "Remove this site from SEO4Ajax" link 4 to open the Remove site popup
• Press the "Save" button 5 to save the current configuration, the button is active only if something changed since the last save

Sitemaps

This panel allows configuring the sitemap URLs of the site.

Sitemaps panel

• Type a sitemap URL 1, it can point to a simple sitemap file or a sitemap index file
• Press the "Crawl sitemaps" button 2 to launch immediately the crawl of the sitemap(s)

Advanced settings

This panel allows configuring options related to the capture process.

Advanced settings panel

• Type the entry points 1 of the site, you should add paths that will help the crawler to find pages to capture.
• Press the "Test rules..." button 4 to open the Test rewrite rules popup

API configuration

This panel allows configuring options related to the public API behavior and the default authenticated API behavior.

API settings panel

Server configuration

This panel displays Apache, Nginx and IIS configuration snippets which can be used to connect your HTTP server with the public API.

Remove site popup

This popup is displayed when you click on the "Remove site from SEO4Ajax" link in the Site settings page.

• Press the "Cancel" button 1 to cancel the action and close the popup
• Press the "Confirm" button 2 to confirm the action.