Improvements to free sitemap visualiser

SiteViz is as its name suggests, a tool for visualising a sitemap.

Integrity Plus, Pro and Scrutiny can export their sitemap data in the form of a .dot file, which contains the information necessary to draw a chart.

Early on, Omnigraffle did a great job of displaying these .dot files but it became expensive. There were other options but nothing free and easy to use. That's where SiteViz came in and its functionality has been built into Scrutiny.

Its default chart didn't look great though. The layout was flawed making the charts less than ideal.

Version 3 contains some vast improvements to that 'bubble tree' theme, along with some improvements to the colouring. Nodes can be coloured according to links in or 'link juice'. (Think liquid flowing through your links). Connections can be coloured according to multiple criteria too. The charts now look much more professional and are much more useful, especially the bubble tree theme. The screenshots you see on this page were made using it.

It will remain a free viewer. You can export the chart as a png image or pdf, but it can't create the .dot sitemap. For that you'll need a website crawler like Integrity Plus or Pro.

Which web pages does Scrutiny include in its SEO table and Sitemap table?

When asked that question recently I had to look through code to find definitive answers (not ideal!) and realised that the manual should contain that information.

It does now, and here's the list for anyone who's interested:

The SEO table will include pages that are:

• html*
• internal (urls with a subdomain may or may not be treated as internal depending on whether the preference is checked in Preferences > General)
• status must be good (ie urls with status 0, 4xx or 5xx will not be included)
• not excluded by your blacklist / whitelist rules on the Settings screen
• your robots.txt file will be observed (ie a page will be excluded if it is disallowed by robots.txt) if that preference is checked on the Settings screen (below Blacklist and Whitelist rules)

The sitemap table will include a subset of those pages - so in addition to the above, the following rules apply:

• will include pdfs (if that preference is checked in Preferences > Sitemap)
• not excluded by your robots.txt file (if that box is checked in Preferences > Sitemap)
• not excluded by a 'robots noindex' meta tag (if that box is checked in Preferences > Sitemap)
• does not have a canonical meta tag that points to a different url

As always, I'm always very happy to look into any particular example that you can't make sense of. 

* this doesn't mean a .html file extension, but the mime type of the page as it is served up. Most web pages will be html. Images are shown in the SEO results but in a separate table which shows the url, page it appears on, and the alt text.

** Although Integrity Plus doesn't display SEO results (at present) it does display the same sitemap table as Scrutiny and all of the rules above apply.

Internal backlinking

The graphs for this website's sitemap are unusual and very attractive.

Here's the 'Daisy' themed graph. perhaps more attractive but maybe less obvious what's going on.

So what *is* going on here? Upon investigation (aka switching on labels by clicking a button in the toolbar)...

... the 2015 pages are all linked from a page, two clicks from home, called 2015 (and only from that page). On that page is a link to a page called 2014 an on that page are links to all 2014 pages plus a link to 2013 pages and so on.

Visiting any of these pages makes it clearer. This is an unusual kind of pagination, a little like scrolling to the bottom of some content and clicking 'more' to load older content. From a user point of view it does work very well. Everything's really obvious, no-one's going to struggle to find the older content, it'll just take more clicks.

So is this a problem? The pages are all discoverable, so no problem there. But some might say that this site isn't making the best exploitation of internal backlinking. In this particular case I don't think it matters, these are reports going back in time, it's unlikely that a visitor is as interested in older reports than the newer ones.

Any other thoughts on the analysis of these graphs or thin internal backlinking - please comment.

(graphs generated by SiteViz, using sitemap files generated by Scrutiny)

Yesterday's post in this series: analysing the structure of larger sites

HTML sitemap export from Scrutiny

Scrutiny 5.0.9 has just been released. It improves the html sitemap export by adding the option to export the list as a flat list (as before) or a heirarchical list (now the default).

The html export is designed to be pasted into a website's sitemap page. Such a page is usually there to make sure that search engines can find all of the pages on your website.

The heirarchical-style view has been requested because it has other uses.

After scanning the site and displaying the Sitemap in Scrutiny, go to Export > HTML. To switch between flat and heirarchical styles, go to Scrutiny > Preferences > Sitemap.

Here's an extract. It's plain HTML which will obviously pick up the styles from your website stylesheet when added to your site.

You may also be interested in:

How to generate an XML sitemap using Scrutiny

Using canonical href to exclude duplicates from your xml sitemap

Update your XML sitemap by FTP on your server using Scrutiny