Version 9 of Integrity and Scrutiny underway

As with version 8, the next major release is likely to look very similar on the surface.

The biggest change will be more information of the 'warning' kind.

So far it's been easy to isolate or export 'bad links'. These tend to be a 4xx or 5xx server response codes, so you can already see at a glance what's wrong. You may have seen links marked with orange, which usually denotes a redirect. And you can easily filter those and export them if you want.

But there are many other warnings that Integrity and Scrutiny could report.

At this point, this won't mean a full validation of the html (that's another story) but there are certain things that the crawling engine encounters as it parses the page for links. One example is the presence of two canonical tags (it happens more often than you'd think). If they contain different urls, it's unclear what Google would do. There are a number of situations like this that the engine handles, and which the user might like to know about.

There are other types of problem, such as an old perennial; one or more "../" ('up a directory') at the start of a relative url which technically takes the url above the server's http root. (Some users take the line "if it works in my browser, then it's fine and your software is incorrectly reporting an error", and for that reason there's a preference to make the app as tolerant as browsers tend to be with these links.)

In short, there are various warnings that Integrity and Scrutiny could list. Version 9 will make use of the orange highlighting. There will be tabs within the link inspector so that it can display more information, and the warnings relating to that link (if any) will be one of these tabs.

Reporting / exporting is important to users. So there will be another main table (with export option) with the links results to display a list of each warning, by link / page.

This will be the main focus but there will be other features. Better re-checking is on the list. This is early days, so if there's anything else that you'd like to see, please do tell!