Siteliner Guide

Siteliner lets you explore your website and identify the key issues that affect your site's quality. This guide helps you understand Siteliner's results and determine which specific steps you might take to improve your website.

SITE RESULTS
   Your Pages
   Duplicate Content
   Broken Links
   Skipped Pages
   Related Domains

PAGE RESULTS
   Duplicate Content
   Internal Links In
   Internal Links Out
   External Links Out
   Show Cached Page
   Show Duplicates

DOWNLOADS
   Site Report
   Current Table
   XML Sitemap

SITE RESULTS

"Site Results" provide summary information about your entire site, while "Page Results" provide detailed information about a particular page. Site results are available for 185 days. The following links appear under Site Results:

Your Pages

The Site Summary shows you key information about all the pages that were successfully scanned on your site, including URL, Title, Page Power, Page Size, Number of Words, and Date Modified.

"Page Power" indicates how prominently a particular page might appear to search engines that crawl your site – the more links pointing at a particular page from other pages on your site, the greater the Page Power of that page, up to a value of 100.

Page power is defined proportionately, which means that links coming in from other high-powered pages are worth more than links coming in from low-powered pages. Therefore, a few high-powered links coming in to a page can be worth more than many low-powered links.

It is always revealing to see the list of pages on your site, and how prominent different pages are. You may want to update or remove any old pages that are no longer relevant. You may also want to add or remove links to ensure that the most important pages on your site are also the most prominent ones from the search engines' perspective. To increase the Page Power of a page, you may want to link to it from other pages on your site that already have a high Page Power.

To find out more information about your site, including potential duplicate content and broken link issues, click on the other links to the left of the report. For more information about a particular page, click on the corresponding row in the Site Summary table.

Duplicate Content

Search engines can penalize your site for duplicate content - identical content found on two or more of the pages on your site. For each page scanned, Siteliner shows you how much of its content was also found on other pages.

You may also click on a row in the table to see the various sections of duplicate content highlighted on the page. The colored shading indicates on which other pages the duplicate content was also found. Click the colored boxes on the right to see the duplicate content from the various other pages. The grey box at the bottom refers to "Common Content" - items such as menus or navigational phrases that typically appear on most or all of your pages, and are therefore not usually considered to be duplicate content.

To address the duplicate content issue, you may want to either remove the duplicate content so it appears on only one of your pages, or modify the content on the various pages to ensure that each page is unique.

Broken links are any links from a page on your site to another page that has moved or no longer exists. Broken Links can reduce your site's search engine rankings and decrease the quality of your visitors' experience. Siteliner systematically checks all the links within your site to ensure that they are functioning. For each page on your site, it shows you how many broken links were found. Click on a row in the table to see the broken links highlighted on your page. The page with highlighted broken links is available for 60 days.

It is good to check for broken links regularly. If you find a broken link, it may be that the page has moved to a new location and the link needs to be updated to point at the new location. It may also be that the page no longer exists, in which case you may want to remove the link or replace it with another link to a page with similar content.

Skipped Pages

Siteliner shows you a list of pages that it skipped during its scan, for one of the following reasons:

  • Canonical - Sometimes websites will have two or more pages with identical content in order to make the same content available through more than one URL, e.g.:

         http://example.com/page.html     and     http://example.com/page.html?user=john

    A canonical link element placed in the 'head' section of a webpage's HTML code tells a search engine that this page is not the original, but rather just a copy that exists to allow for this URL flexibility. Siteliner skips pages that have the canonical link element in the section.

  • Meta Tag Redirection - Some webpages redirect visitors to another webpage by placing an instruction inside the Meta tag in the page's HTML source. Siteliner skips pages that redirect to other pages in this way.

  • Frame Redirection - Some webpages redirect the visitor to a second webpage by placing the second webpage inside an HTML Frame on the first webpage. Siteliner skips pages that redirect to other pages in this way.
  • HTTP Header Redirection - Some webpages redirect visitors to another webpage by placing an instruction inside the HTTP Header of the page's HTML source.
  • Disallowed by robots.txt - The robots.txt file on your site indicates to search engines which pages they should visit and include in their search results. Siteliner skips pages that are disallowed in robots.txt, unless you choose to override this in the advanced options on the Premium Scan page.
  • noindex in robots meta tag - Similar to the robots.txt file, a robots meta tag on a particular page can indicate to search engines whether or not to index the page and include it in their search results. Siteliner skips pages that have the noindex value in their robots meta tag.
  • nofollow links in - If all links pointing to a particular page on your site have a nofollow attribute, Siteliner skips that page, unless you choose to override this in the advanced options on the Premium Scan page.
  • Errors - Sometimes a web server returns an error when Siteliner requests a particular page - e.g. "404 Not Found" or "500 Internal Server Error", etc. Siteliner skips these pages.
  • Siteliner crawls your site in a way that is similar to most major search engines. This means that pages skipped by Siteliner are likely to also be skipped by the search engines. If you do not want certain pages on your site to be skipped by search engines, you will may modify your robots.txt, meta tags, redirects, etc. as appropriate based on the reasons listed in the 'Skipped Pages' results.

    Siteliner shows you other subdomains within the site you have entered. For example, if you entered 'http://en.wikipedia.org/' (English Wikipedia), Siteliner will show you the related subdomains within that site such as 'http://aa.wikipedia.org/' and 'http://ab.wikipedia.org/' (Wikipedia in other languages). It is important to scan all the subdomains in your site. Clicking on a row in the table sets up a new scan for that subdomain, unless you have already scanned it in the past, in which case Siteliner will take you to the existing report for that subdomain.

    Siteliner may also show you a closely related form of the URL you entered: e.g. if you entered 'http://example.com', Siteliner will show you the related domain 'http://www.example.com'. These forms are closely related, but may appear different in the eyes of search engines.

    PAGE RESULTS

    Page results provide detailed information for a particular page. To see Page results, click on a row in the Site Summary. You can return to the Site Results at any time by clicking "Site Results" on the left. Page results are available for 185 days. The following links appear under Page Results:

    Duplicate Content

    Siteliner shows you all the pages with duplicate content matching the selected page. Click on a row in the table to see the duplicate content highlighted on the page. The colored shading refers to which other pages the duplicate content was also found. Click the colored boxes on the right to see the duplicate content from the various other pages. The grey box at the bottom refers to "Common Content" - items such as menus or navigational phrases that typically appear on most or all of your pages, and are therefore not usually considered to be duplicate content. The page with highlighted duplicate content is available for 60 days.

    Search engines can penalize your site for duplicate content. You may want to either remove the duplicate content so it appears on only one of your pages, or modify the content on the various pages to ensure that each page is unique.

    Siteliner shows you all the pages on your website with links pointing to the selected page.

    A link between two pages of your website allows your visitors to easily move through your site to access relevant and related content. Such a link also strengthens the "Page Power" or prominence of the page being linked to. It is always good to consider carefully which pages you link to within your site, in order to direct your visitors and search engines crawling your site to the pages you want to emphasize. If you want to raise the prominence of a page on your site, you might consider adding links to it from other relevant pages.

    Siteliner shows you all the links from the selected page that point to other pages on your website.

    A link between two pages of your website allows your visitors to easily move through your site to access relevant and related content. Such a link also strengthens the "Page Power" or prominence of the page being linked to. It is always good to consider carefully which pages you link to within your site, in order to direct your visitors and any search engines crawling your site to the pages you feel are most important. If you want to raise the prominence of a page on your site, you might consider adding links to it from relevant pages.

    Siteliner shows you all the links from the selected page that point to pages on other websites.

    A link from your website to an external website allows your visitors to easily move from your site to the other site, and may be considered by some as an endorsement for the content on the other site. It is always good to consider carefully which sites you link to and whether you wish to send your visitors to these external sites. External pages may change their content or cease to exist at any time, so it is important to regularly monitor and check all external links to ensure that they continue to contain the content that you wish to link to. This may be done by simply clicking on all the links that appear in the table and checking the resulting pages that appear.

    Show Cached Page

    Siteliner shows you its cached version of the selected page -- this is the version of the page that Siteliner downloaded when it performed the scan of your site.

    If your page has changed since Siteliner scanned your site, you might find this information useful. It may also be useful if you wish to see what information is made available to a crawler that is scanning your site. In this case it is Siteliner's crawler, but similar results would likely be presented to a crawler belonging to a search engine.

    This report is available for 60 days.

    Show Duplicates

    Siteliner highlights the duplicate content found on the selected page. The colored shading refers to which other pages the duplicate content was also found. Click the colored boxes on the right to see the duplicate content from the various other pages. The grey box at the bottom refers to "Common Content" - items such as menus or navigational phrases that typically appear on most or all of your pages, and are therefore not usually considered to be duplicate content.

    Search engines can penalize your site for duplicate content. You may want to either remove the duplicate content so it appears on only one of your pages, or modify the content on other pages to ensure that each page is unique.

    This report is available for 60 days.

    DOWNLOADS

    Siteliner offers a number of download options:

    Site Report

    Siteliner provides a complete site report, which includes all the major columns available for each page in the Site Results. The file is made available in csv format.

    Current Table

    You may also choose to download only the current table showing on your screen. The file is made available in csv format.

    XML Sitemap

    Siteliner also creates a standard XML Sitemap, useful for providing additional information to search engines about the pages on your site. To learn more about how to submit your sitemap to search engines, see here.