Release Notes for version 1.7.0.21

This new version is a major stepstone of the SEO site analyzer, extending its coverage of off-site SEO auditing with it's new major feature "Links Inspector". The release sees also a UI revamp and the introduction of a huge number of usability and user experience improvents, other than bug fixes and same performance gain.

What follows is a fully detailed Release Notes; for more insights about the release please read: Visual SEO 1.7: Links Inspector

New Features:

• A whole brand new feature: Links Inspector.
  Both an advanced backlink profile inspector and an internal links analyzer, "Links Inspector" will revolutionize the way users perform backlink audits. Effective break-down pie charts and aggregated views about all interesting link attributes give an immediate idea of how your backlinks (and internal links) are composed. Links can be searched to match several possible filters (internal, external, pointing to a specific domain, etc..). A customizable and fully exportable table will report all links matching the search criterion, and show all important link attributes. Many attribute columns are hidden not to overcrowd the view, and let user concentrate on the most important stuff. The tool computes and applies all necessary checks to report whether a link can pass PageRank, and in case if such PageRank is received by the destination URL and not wasted. User can enable visibility of all possible property and can manually inspect with a single click the link source code in Content and DOM view to double check on his own. Cherry on the cake, a powerful classifier can detect the type of link (footer, content, comment, etc...).
• Page Links bottom pane now has a new "Link type" column to classify the link (content link, footer link, comment link...)

Usability/UX:

• UI revamped
  Now the most important call to action buttons are easier to spot: bigger, with bold test and a light green background.
  Redundant borders in the UI have been removed to make it lighter, and some texts were made easier to understand.
  Some windows have been re-designed to make their mission clearer.
  These are the first steps of an ongoing process.
• "Administered sites" renamed as "Verified sites" (all languages), a term likely more familiar to users.
  The term "administered sites is still used in some auxiliary texts for clarity sake and to avoid repetitions.
• "Index View" renamed as "Folder View" (all languages), a clearer and less confusing term.
• Manage Sessions window: toolbar and context menu entry order rearranged (as also done in main menu and left-side command pad) based on their popularity.
• Pro Trial registration form: now the final success notification is a little more pleasant to read.
• Pro Edition activation key inserted form: now the final success notification is a little more pleasant to read.
• Crawl session window: crawl options were confusing users, giving too much information than normally needed and making user lose focus on what really mattered.
  Now they are collapsed and user can show/hide them using a link.
• Readability form: now right pane tools start collapsed.
• GA Suggestions form: now right pane tools start collapsed.
• Find results panel: now top window controls share the same toolbar style look and feel of the other panels.
• Page links bottom pane: now the toolbar displays the full URL of the resource, not only its path.
• (Italian language) "Visita lista URL" renamed as "Esplora lista URL".
• (Russian language only) unified notations for view names.
• Manage sessions form: right-click context menu entries for "Crawl view" and "Folder view" (formerly "Index View") now uniformed to general naming convention (all languages).
• Community Edition: when a crawl completes because the maximum number of 500 pages has been hit (limitation of the Community Edition) a window pops up to clearly explain it.
• Upgrade to Pro Edition window made clearer.
• H1..H6 window: removed from upper toolbar minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
• view switcher used at the top of Crawl, Index and Tabular views: removed minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
• hreflang checker: now right pane tools start collapsed.
• hreflang checker: removed from language directives viewer toolbar minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
• hreflang checker: removed from hreflang viewer toolbar minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
• hreflang checker: page URL in language directives viewer now stretches over the whole available horizontal space.
• hreflang checker: page URL in hreflang viewer now stretches over the whole available horizontal space.
• Page CSS and Scripts bottom pane: grids now show a progressive row number in the row header (regardless how data is sorted).
• Page Images bottom pane: grid now shows a progressive row number in the row header (regardless how data is sorted).
• DOM view side panel now shows on top of it the URL of the resource (the view is also used on reports where the context of the URL is not immediate, so this makes it crystal clear).
• Content side panel now shows on top of it the URL of the resource (the view is also used on reports where the context of the URL is not immediate, so this makes it crystal clear).
• Page headings H1..H6, added Page URL field.
• "Screen Shots" set of tool moved after "XML Sitemaps" and "Robots.txt", since they are less used.
• Page Links bottom pane: column "target" resized and centered.
• Multi crawl form: "OK" button renamed to "Crawl".
• All context menu entries "Copy Full URL" renamed to "Copy URL" (all languages).
• Crawl dialogs (normal crawl, sitemap auditing, list of URL, multi-site): main C2A button is now much easier to spot.
• Custom Filters form: C2A button now much easier to spot.
• Data Extraction form: C2A button now much easier to spot.
• XML Sitemap creation form: C2A button now much easier to spot, and reacts to Enter key.
• Readability Analysis form: C2A button now much easier to spot, and reacts to Enter key.
• Grids, a new dialog enables choosing the visibility of multiple columns. You can invoke it from the grid context menu (right-click on the upper-left gear icon).
  Replaces the old approach of expanded menu: changing visibility to more columns was little usable, especially in case of grids with many columns.
  Supports undo function and customization persistence.
  Notice the new approach also supports columns added dynamically at a later time (e.g. data extraction, or GSC search analytics columns...).
• Non-crawled Items window: Added "Referrer URL (decoded)" column, and hidden by default column "Referrer (decoded)" (path only).
• HTTP Issues window: Added "Referrer URL (decoded)" column, and hidden by default column "Referrer (decoded)" (path only).
• Search Results window: Added "URL" column, and hidden by default columns "Authority" and "Path (decoded)". They carried the same meaning, combined, but took more real estate space and were less pleasant to see due to the Authority column alignment.
• Non-crawled Items windows: Added "URL" column, and hidden by default columns "Authority" and "Path (decoded)". They carried the same meaning, combined, but took more real estate space and were less pleasant to see due to the Authority column alignment.
• HTTP Issues windows: Added "URL" column, and hidden by default columns "Authority" and "Path (decoded)". They carried the same meaning, combined, but took more real estate space and were less pleasant to see due to the Authority column alignment.
• The new view switcher control is present on the crawl-time dialog thus allowing the user to quickly switch between views once the crawling session has ended
• Google Search Console "Search Analytics" integration dialog: list of sites used to include property sets. Selected, they would work, but their name is not available via API (v.3), there is only a cryptic ID that made a poor user experience (especially when there are more than one), so we prefer to hide them.
• Crawl option "Crawl also outside of start folder" checkbox position indented to make it clearer you have to untick the option "Crawl sub-domains" above it in order to have it enabled.
• Suggestion trees now sport a new toolbar to substitute the old detail controls. It is more pleasant to see and better fits text lengths staying aligned with the rest of the UI.
• Suggestion tables now sport a new toolbar to substitute the old detail controls. It is more pleasant to see and better fits text lengths staying aligned with the rest of the UI.
• Progress bars now all show a decimal digit when displaying percentages, and the progress percentage is updated at least every ten seconds, thus giving more feedback when processing huge amounts of data.
• UI: Tabular View client area better aligned with other views.
• Tree views now all exactly aligned in Crawl view, Index view and crawl time windows. Crawl-time window controls rearranged (overlay panel was in an ugly position; bottom controls slightly moved downward).
• Better alignment of UI controls on real time crawl user interface.
• UI tweak: in "hreflang Analysis", the padding of the first tab "With hreflang" has been uniformed to the other tabs padding.
• Grids, context menu command that appears clicking on the upper-left corner gear icon: the add/remove columns icon has been updated lest it were confused with other functions.
• Tabular view: added top-right button to quickly add GSC "search analytics" data column (one could have added it via context menu right-clicking the top-left gear icon, but this button is much easier to spot). Top right buttons re-arranged and made a little less invasive.
• Crawl URL List form: checkboxes for advanced options are now hidden to make the window less confusing (their default values are most of the times good). They can be expanded/collapsed with a click.

Performance:

• Fixed major performance bottleneck mostly affecting large crawls (when several tens of thousands of URLs had already been crawled, so the slow down wasn't perceived with small crawls of few hundreds of URLs).
• Removed speed bottleneck which impacted crawl performances in case of large crawls with big numbers of queued items waiting to be crawled. It's just a drop in the bucket, other crawl performance improvements will come in the near future.
• Minor performance gain when crawling: in case of depth limit, links are not parsed.
• Minor improvement in crawl performances.
• Now loading from DB is somewhat faster.

Various:

• Crawl: the program now permits to set max crawl depth to zero, typically to only crawl the Home Page (previous min depth was one).
  Note: one could have set the maximum number of pages to 1 to obtain the same results.
• We are now using a new digital certificate to sign our programs.
  This might mean for the first few hundred uses to install the new version to have to grant a confirmation button more than usual in the browser or OS subsystem, until the new certificate will gain enough trust. This is the way trust-based certificates work, sorry guys.
• Installer: we dropped the user survey on uninstall (you might occasionally see it if you are updating and older version, but that would be the last).
• Now that Find function searches in the whole URL and not only in the URL path, the search criteria string has been updated.
• Find pages dialog: first option renamed from "Search in URL path" to "Search in URL" (all languages); now it actually works for the full URL.
• "Crawl URL List": the spider now follows cross-domain redirects when crawling a URL list.
  This makes easier to audit cross-domain migration or redirected backlink profiles.

Fixes:

• Google Search Console "Search Analytics" integration dialog: fixed crash which could have occurred when clicking on the operator column header.
  One real user actually experienced, sorry mate!
• "hreflang Analysis": fixed crashing condition occurring when selected a tab with zero elements and trying to visualize the hreflang items list or the language directives bottom panes.
• Fixed crashing condition which occurred to one user when selecting an accept-language value for a customized crawl. We were unable to actually reproduce it, but the the current fix makes it impossible to occur again.
• Fixed potential crashing condition that could have occurred using in some cases the "empty grid helper", no real user had been affected by this issue.
• "hreflang Analysis", switching tabs didn't update the current page reported by the bottom and right panes.
• "Find in grid": if no cell was initially selected, the first cell in the grid was skipped from search.
• "Find in grid" couldn't find values in cells if the underlying data type wasn't pure text. Now if a text is displayed in the grid cell, it will be found.
• HTML Suggestions: criteria rule for meta description truncation is "more than 2 lines", but the UI stated "more than 3".
• HTTP Issues bottom panel: a couple of columns (site authority name and path decoded) were not visible and not selectable, they are now not visible and user can select them. Non selectable (and still visible) - i.e. mandatory - is now the "URL" column.
• Manage Sessions form: right side "crawl session" window didn't always populate with selected crawl session row.
• "Crawl session" side window: some field values didn't update their translations when switching language.
• Crawl session window: tab order fixed.
• Readability analysis: fixed potential crashing condition that could have occurred had the user clicked on Compute button while the program was still loading pages data from DB. Now the buttons is disabled during that phase.
• Fixed wrong behavior that prevented some users to complete registration of the Pro Trial (when the program was closed before inserting the license serial number).
• Grids: clicking on the expandable "Pick columns" menu item (right click context menu on the gear icon in the upper-left corner) invoked the "Search in grid..." dialog.
• Crawl URL List window: checkbox option "For robots.txt file, treat a redirection to [other domain]/robots.txt as 'full allow'" was wrongly anchored and disappeared when resizing the window.
• Typos fixed (all languages).