Change Detection

Change Detection

The Change Detection tab contains data and filters around changes between current and previous crawls.

This tab will only be available if you are in ‘Compare’ mode when performing a crawl comparison.

In ‘Compare’ mode, click on the compare configuration via ‘Config > Compare’ (or the ‘cog’ icon at the top) and select the elements and metrics you want to identify changes in.

Once the crawl comparison has been run, the ‘Change Detection’ tab will appear in the master view and in the Overview tab, containing filters for any elements and metrics selected with details of changes discovered.

Columns

This tab includes the following columns for current and previous crawls.

• Address – The URL address.
• Indexability – Whether the URL is Indexable or Non-Indexable.
• Title 1 – The (first) page title discovered on the page.
• Meta Description 1 – The (first) meta description on the page.
• h1 – 1 – The first h1 (heading) on the page.
• Word Count – This is all ‘words’ inside the body tag, excluding HTML markup. The count is based upon the content area that can be adjusted under ‘Config > Content > Area’. By default, the nav and footer elements are excluded. You can include or exclude HTML elements, classes and IDs to calculate a refined word count. Our figures may not be exactly what performing this calculation manually would find, as the parser performs certain fix-ups on invalid HTML. Your rendering settings also affect what HTML is considered. Our definition of a word is taking the text and splitting it by spaces. No consideration is given to visibility of content (such as text inside a div set to hidden).
• Crawl Depth – Depth of the page from the start page (number of ‘clicks’ away from the start page). Please note, redirects are counted as a level currently in our page depth calculations.
• Inlinks – Number of internal hyperlinks to the URL. ‘Internal inlinks’ are links in anchor elements pointing to a given URL from the same subdomain that is being crawled.
• Unique Inlinks – Number of ‘unique’ internal inlinks to the URL. ‘Internal inlinks’ are links in anchor elements pointing to a given URL from the same subdomain that is being crawled. For example, if ‘page A’ links to ‘page B’ 3 times, this would be counted as 3 inlinks and 1 unique inlink to ‘page B’.
• Outlinks – Number of internal outlinks from the URL. ‘Internal outlinks’ are links in anchor elements from a given URL to other URLs on the same subdomain that is being crawled.
• Unique Outlinks – Number of unique internal outlinks from the URL. ‘Internal outlinks’ are links in anchor elements from a given URL to other URLs on the same subdomain that is being crawled. For example, if ‘page A’ links to ‘page B’ on the same subdomain 3 times, this would be counted as 3 outlinks and 1 unique outlink to ‘page B’.
• External Outlinks – Number of external outlinks from the URL. ‘External outlinks’ are links in anchor elements from a given URL to another subdomain.
• Unique External Outlinks – Number of unique external outlinks from the URL. ‘External outlinks’ are links in anchor elements from a given URL to another subdomain. For example, if ‘page A’ links to ‘page B’ on a different subdomain 3 times, this would be counted as 3 external outlinks and 1 unique external outlink to ‘page B’.
• Unique Types – The unique number of structured data itemtypes discovered for the URL.

Filters

This tab includes the following filters.

• Indexability – Pages that have changed indexability (Indexable or Non-Indexable).
• Page Titles – Pages that have changed page title elements.
• Meta Description – Pages that have changed meta descriptions.
• H1 – Pages that have changed h1.
• Word Count – Pages that have changed word count.
• Crawl Depth – Pages that have changed crawl depth.
• Inlinks – Pages that have changed inlinks.
• Unique Inlinks – Pages that have changed unique inlinks.
• Internal Outlinks – Pages that have changed internal outlinks.
• Unique Internal Outlinks – Pages that have changed unique internal outlinks.
• External Outlinks – Pages that have changed external outlinks.
• Unique External Outlinks – Pages that have changed unique external outlinks.
• Structured Data Unique Types – Pages that have changed unique number of structured data itemtypes discovered.
• Content – Pages where the content has changed by more than 10% (or the configured similarity change under ‘Config > Compare’).

For more information on Change Detection, please read our tutorial on ‘How To Compare Crawls‘.