Search Results

The information present in the table Search Results refer to the result of the research made with the button Find Pages... present in the Tabular, Crawl and Folder views, with which it is possible to find pages searching by text.

Pages found

The number of pages found using the selected criteria.

Search criteria

The parameters used as search criteria for finding the shown result set.

Icon

The icon column gives an indication on the state of the explored resource. You can view an explanation of the used icons and colors thanks to the Legend you can activate with the link above the table on the left.

Used icons and their meaning are:

• when the explored resource did not generate errors
• if we got an error while exploring a resource (e.g. when a resource is not found producing a 404 error)
• the warning icon is not necessarily an error, but means the result of the exploration of the resource needs special attention
• when the web server returns a 418 HTTP error
• when the resource has not been explored

Prog. #

Indicates the progressive number during the crawler exploration.

Thanks to this progressive number you can get an idea on how a search engine spider would explore your website, a piece of information you should take into account when dealing with Crawl Budget issues, typical of large websites.
For example, you may realize the spider takes exploration paths towards content areas you repute less important compared to the ones you think more strategical; in such case you should intervene on the website link structure.

Note: the crawl progressive number is an approximation:
Visual SEO Studio uses an exploration pattern called Breadth-first, which is demonstrated to be the most efficient in finding important contents in absence of external signals; the actual exploration order can slightly change because of the parallelization used for speed reasons during the crawl process. Using a single crawl thread you could make it strictly repeatable.
Search engines exploration patterns are on their part high asynchronous, and exploration priority is weighted by - in Google case - the resources PageRank which could be inflated by external links.

Status

The HTTP response code received from the web server upon requesting the resource.

Response codes can be summarized in five standard classes:

• 1xx Informative response – request was received and its processing is going on (it is very unlikely you will ever see a 1xx response code)
• 2xx Success – request was received successfully, understood, accepted and served (it is the response code you normally want to see).
• 3xx Redirection – the requested resource is no longer at the address used
• 4xx Client Error – request has a syntax error or cannot be honored
• 5xx Server Error – web server were unable to honor an apparently valid request

Some very common answers are for example 200 (OK - the standard response for HTTP requests successfully served), 301 (Moved Permanently - used when a page URL is changed and you don't want to "break" external links to the old URL nor you want to lose the page indexation on search engines and want to preserve its PageRank.

(Redirect) do work as follows: when an old URL is requested, the web server answers the client (a browser, or a search engine spider) with a HTTP code 3xx to report the address has changed, and adding in the HTTP header the new address. The browser will then have to request with a new HTTP call the resource to the new address, and in case of permanent redirect could remember for the future the redirection in order to avoid making a double call when the link to the old address will be clicked again.

Redirects can be implemented on the server side using several methods, depending on the used technology and the platform the web server is running on. For example by configuring the .htaccess file on Apache web servers with generic or specific rules; or with dedicated plugins in a WordPress installation; or in case of web sites in ASP.NET technology with rules expressed in the web.config file, or directives set in the single page, or in the logic of the used CMS engine.

Having redirects is not an error per-se, but if they are detected - as it normally happens - during a normal site crawl navigating internal links, it is sign that such internal links were not updated after the URLs change. It is recommended to update the internal links with the new URLs in order not to slow down user navigation experience and not to waste the crawl budget allotted by the search engine.

Particular attention should be given to the 4xx response codes, which Visual SEO Studio rightly reports as errors.
The 4xx codes you will stumble upon are usually 404 (Resource not found) and the nearly identical (Resource no longer existing). Their presence is symptom of a broken link that should be corrected, because user and search engine can not reach the link destination page.

5xx response codes are errors occurred on the web server when it was trying to build the resource to return to the browser or the spider.
They could be a temporary issue, but they should normally not ignored, better reporting them to the developer and investigate on the server side. 5xx errors are a very bad user experience, make visitors abandon the website, and potentially can cause de-indexation by the search engines if repeated over time.

For a more in-depth description of HTTP response codes you can consult the following page on Wikipedia: HTTP status codes

Status Code

The textual description of the HTTP response code received from the web server upon requesting the resource.

Page Type

This column shows an icon representing the type of resource crawled. Possible values are:

• When the crawled resource is a robots.txt file
• when the crawled resource is an XML page (this is the case of a Sitemap)
• when the crawled resource is a HTML page
• when the crawled resource is an image

URL

Uniform Resource Locator, the resource address.

For a better search engine optimization it is preferable having "friendly" URLs (i.e. URLs anticipating the page content) and not too long.

Full Authority Name

The combination of protocol, host name and, if different from the default value, port number.

An important piece of information you can see form the Authority Name for example is whether the URL is protected by the secure HTTPS protocol.

It could also be handy having the authority name shown in case of explorations of URL lists or of sites with more sub-domains.

Path (encoded)

The resource path, with URL encoding when required.

Due to a limit of the HTTP protocol, a URL when "running on the wire" can only contain ASCII characters (i.e. Western characters with no diacritics). URL encoding replaces special characters (diacritics, spaces, non-Western alphabet letters, ...) with their Escape sequence.

Many URLs are only composed of ASCII character, and since they do not need encoding, the encoded and decoded version of their path look the same, but let's have a look to an example URL written in Cyrillic:

Path: /о-компании (a typical URL path for a company page, it translates from Russian as /about-company)

Since HTTP protocol cannot convoy non-ASCII characters, in order to permit these human-readable URL paths the characters are encoded by the browser transparently before sending them on the wire to request the resource to a web server, transforming the example path as:

Path (encoded): /%D0%BE-%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B8

The encoding used is called percent-encoding
Visual SEO Studio by default shows URLs and Paths in their decoded, human-readable form, but user might want to see the encoded version to investigate URL issues.

Path (decoded)

The resource path (URL decoded, thus in human-readable form).

Title

The HTML page title, as read from the title HTML tag.

This is one of the page elements with greater SEO relevance for a good positioning in search engines. The title should describe efficiently and briefly the page content. It should not be duplicated (no other pages should have the same title) and should not be excessively long to avoid its truncation in the SERP (use the preview tool "SERP preview" to verify the title were shown in its entirety).

In the past it was common adding among its first words the main keyword, today also synonyms are correctly interpreted by search engines to categorize a page. Keep in mind that today's search engines are much better than in the past in understanding a page semantic content, so ensure your titles are really aligned to the page contents.

Meta Description

The description snippet suggested to be shown in the SERP.

It is specified within the HTML head section using the meta tag with attributes name="description" and content="...".
It should be attractive in order to increase the CTR (Click-Through Rate), the probability for a user to click on the link in SERP to visit the page.