hreflang analysis: even more powerful!
Readability analysis: added "Detected Language" column
New Custom Filter operator for string fields: 'Contains any of'
Custom Filters and Data Extraction can clone criteria
Conclusions, and what’s next
hreflang analysis: even more powerful!
Code-named "Papio papio", this release further consolidates Visual SEO Studio as the most complete hreflang checker.
"Conflicting language directives" report and "Page language directives" viewer
Yandex and Google support hreflang tags, Bing uses instead the 'content-language' HTTP header or meta tag. Other tools - screen readers for visually impaired people, software translators...) use the HTML "lang" attribute. There are several language directives a webmaster has to ensure do not conflict.
A new report in hreflang Analysis will do the heavy lifting for you, listing all the pages where language directives are not matching. Language directives, and detected language as well.
The new "Conflicting language directives" report in hreflang Analysis
The alternate/hreflang tags helps them to decide which of a set of "paired" pages to show in a localized SERP, but Google and other search engines use language detection to understand the language family.
We decided so to provide a tool to show for every single page all possible language directives to see if they match. And we added a state-of-the-art language detector to test the language of title, description, and main content.
Page language directives view in Visual SEO Studio (click to enlarge)
How many times in our work we found pages in a language, with the title and/or the meta description in another. There was not tool to uncover such issues, so we built it!
The language detector can recognize 80+ main languages. It needs at least five words to attempt a detection, and for the main content it will look for at least 20 words of representative text (more would make it slow). Some wrong detections might happen especially in case of short titles, nevertheless we have been surprised by how many issues it detected that really needed a fix.
Full support for hreflang HTTP headers
The missing bit we couldn't deliver last month, hreflang detection in HTTP header is now fully supported.
hreflang viewer in Visual SEO Studio (click to enlarge)
hreflang tags are now searched both in HTTP headers and HTML link meta tags and merged for the analysis. We added in the hreflang viewer two boolean columns - "HTML" and "HTTP" - to show where each tag was found. It could be both are marked, or only one of them.
Readability analysis: added "Detected Language" column
The Readability Analysis feature is becoming popular, we receive more feedback than we expected. A common problem with multilingual sites was often the selected language for the analysis wasn't what the user expected to be for some pages (even when they filtered by localized path). It makes no sense applying a readability score to a text in a language different from the one it is meant for, and users asked for the tool to point out the issue.
Detected language column in Readability Analysis
Since we were already introducing a top-notch language detector, applying it in Readability Analysis has been smooth.
New Custom Filter operator for string fields: 'Contains any of'
Some users make heavy use of Custom Filters, with complex combinations of search criteria. We wanted to simplify their daily work for some common usage cases. This resulted in a new query operator for text fields:
"Contains any of" search for any occurrence of any of the given substrings. Multiple items to search for are separated by commas.
'Contains-Any-Of' Custom Filter operator
An example of use is searching for hacked pages; even if it could be achieved with an OR cascade, this way it's more straightforward and - in case of a big number of terms - performs faster.
Custom Filters and Data Extraction can clone criteria
Another pain-point we addressed: users making heavy use of Data Extraction or Custom Filters found themselves often inputting very similar criteria, and asked a way to clone an existing set to modify it without having to insert everything from scratch. Ask, and you shall be given:
Cloning Data Extraction criteria
Cloning Custom Filters criteria
We love when users give us such feedback, it helps us making a better product. A real win-win.
Conclusions, and what’s next
Visual SEO Studio has been the first SEO tool to support full Unicode characters in URL paths, to support Internationalized Domain Names, to permit bulk-checking thoroughly all possible issues in hreflang audits.
The release "Papio papio" is a further step to conquer the hearts of those working in International SEO, and those working in realities different from the only anglo saxon environment. Not only provides a powerful language detector to assist content auditing in multilingual sites, also fixes a long-standing crashing issue that afflicted in same instances to users who set the system calendar as Persian (most of the times), Saudi Hijri (Um Al Qura), or Japanese (sorry guys/gals, and thanks to who helped us pinpoint the issue and fix it for good!).
There several other changes and improvements in "Papio papio", for a complete list please check the Release Notes.
We built "hreflang Analysis" - our hreflang checker - to be the best hreflang checker by a long shot, and we think we nailed it. The only missing bit is auditing hreflang tags in XML Sitemaps, something you can expect very soon.
Other new features are in development, we are looking forward the time to release them.
You might wonder what "Papio papio" stands for. We always have fun code-naming the version under development; we normally keep the meaning for ourselves, usually it is quite straightforward guessing the meaning. We'll make an exception:
A recent research with a variety of baboons "Papio papio" apparently demonstrated they have been able to discriminate with 75% of confidence English words from made-up words, supposedly recognizing the typical bigrams composing the real words. The language recognition library we used works more or less the same way.
Enough talking! Now unleash 'Papio papio' and audit your multilingual content!
Comments are open on linked Facebook page.