URL canonicalization under control
H1 title issues easier to spot
Conclusions, and what’s next
URL canonicalization under control
URL Canonicalization issues are hard to tackle, now you have the proper tool to do it.
URL Suggestions summary page (click to enlarge)
Some types of websites - e-commerce, for example - often have many URLs leading to the very same logical product page. They need to leverage rel="canonical" links to help search engines sort out what would otherwise be seen as duplicate content.
We added to URL Suggestions seven new reports dedicated to URL canonicalization issues to help you have a clear view. Beta testers have found them invaluable, and we wish they will ease your daily work too!
Note:
"URL Suggestions" is available only in the Professional Edition. You can evaluate it for free for 15 days by registering the Trial version.
H1 title issues easier to spot
Users often felt HTML Suggestions lacked insights about H1 titles. There are not strict rules, but in general makes sense having a single unique H1 title per page, so we added three new reports dedicated to inspect the first found occurrence of H1 title: pages missing H1, and pages with duplicate H1 text (as usual, detected over all pages or over canonical pages only).
HTML Suggestions summary page (click to enlarge)
Remember, having more H1 titles is perfectly valid HTML. The three reports only take into account the first found instance of H1s, assuming you wanted to follow a common practice of having only one. We very soon will also add a report to quickly find the pages having multiple H1s to give a complete picture.
The case of a H1 title with no inner text will be flagged as missing. Some WordPress themes for example have the bad habit to wrap the main upper-left site logo with an H1 tag (it will typically be the first H1 met in the HTML); those pages will be seen as "Missing H1 text". We felt it were the correct way to handle the case.
By the way: with Custom Filters you have a powerful tool to locate pages having more instances of any H1..H6 titles.
Note: the three new reports only works for crawl sessions made with Visual SEO Studio 1.6.4 or greater; the H1..H6 viewer and other inspectors though work with pages downloaded with any version of the spider.
Conclusions, and what's next
Visual SEO Studio "Jordan" is mostly a maintenance release, albeit it add great value to the most popular sets of reports. While it doesn't add new big features, it enriches the two most popular ones in the spirit of "helping to do the simple things best". Not only Jordan adds new new stuff, it contains many Usability and UX improvements, and several bug fixes. For a complete list of the changes, please read the Release Notes.
For the future, we are working on several fronts. The most prominent is the Mac version of the product. We probably will ship a public beta in the near future.
Now, your sites might have URL canonicalization issues waiting to be uncovered and fixed. Don't waste time and hunt them with Visual SEO Studio!
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