Multi-lingual support: Russian User Interface added
As previously announced, now Visual SEO Studio speaks Russian:
Visual SEO Studio with Russian user interface
The product already has hundreds of users from Russian-speaking countries, and I wanted to do something to thank them for their appreciation.
I have been fortunate to meet Анастасия Сармант, a brilliant software developer who volunteered for the translation. In a short time she provided me with a first baked version, permitting to have a starting base so I could ask Илья Гайдук, a skilled SEO from Kazan and Visual SEO Studio advanced user, to join forces. The two did a meticulous job working thousands of kilometers apart, I'm very grateful for their help.
Customizable Thresholds for HTML and URL Suggestions
The software has a powerful engine sometimes not fully leveraged by the user interface. This feature was ready under the hood since time and I simply forgot to enable it! Thanks to the end user who gave me the heads up.
When testing it, I realized it could be appreciated by many SEO professionals who have strict policies in place and don't want to settle with the defaults imposed by SEO software.
HTML and URL Suggestions criteria now configurable
A little hint: while I implemented also reports to detect titles and meta descriptions lengths based on the number of characters, please keep in mind that's not what search engines like Google care for.
Visual SEO Studio is probably the only SEO Audit Software able to report titles exceeding the the width in pixel allowed in the SERP before having your text truncated, and those exceeding the number of works after which your keywords would not be retrieved with the intitle: operator. See the page HTML Suggestions for further details.
More control over the crawling process
You can now optionally restrict crawling within a sub-folder, if you provide a deep link as start URL.
Crawler can be restricted within a sub-directory
Not exactly how a search bot behaves, but it was a commonly required feature by users, and you can think about it as a simulation of the effect of changes at the robots.txt file.
Other changes to give finer control over the crawling process will come soon.
New user-agents available
Google has recently changed the user-agent used to crawl Smartphone enabled web sites, and I profited to add - other than the new one - also support for the other strings used to crawl mobile phones enabled web site:
Visual SEO Studio supports the latest user-agents
Please notice that user-agent spoofing option is available only for the sites listed in the administered web sites (or for local sites), for ethical reasons.
An annoying crashing bug fixed, and an apology
With the previous release I introduced an appreciated improvement to usability, an 'X' button directly on the tab sheets.
Unfortunately with it I also introduced a bad bug: under some corner-case conditions it (clicking on tab 'X' button of the last open tab, and then suddenly and quickly moving the mouse pointer out of the tabs banner) it caused the program to crash.
After I received the fist crash report I fixed it straight away. I struggled to reproduce it using two hands and reputed very unlikely to happen, but when thousands of users click, this things can repeat and indeed several users experienced the crash condition.
What's worst, another corner-case but on the back-end crash server system side (a report of a crash condition already marked as "fixed but not published yet") caused the crash report instance not to be logged. I fixed it as soon as I realized what it was, but there is a handful of user who might have reported the bug leaving me a description and an e-mail address for me to reply.
Sorry guys/gals, I'm not that rude, I never received those addresses and I couldn't reply you. And sorry for the bad user experience as well!
Conclusions, and What's Next
This version is an important milestone for the Russian speaking market, and a more stable release for all the users.
It also receives several little improvements; for a detailed list of the changes, please refer to the full release notes.
There are several changes I wished to push for the current release, and instead had to procrastinate:
XML Sitemap testing, Crawl by XML sitemap list, Polish language support. They all are almost there, but couldn't make it due to time constrains. They are very likely to appear next month.
I had to postpone the Yandex APIs basic integration - it's almost done - due to issues in their authentication process I cannot work around. Their team is very collaborative and promised to fix the issues, I will then follow suite.
Other than that, there are all the features pre-announced in the past are likely to appear soon. High in the list, a system to detect memory shortage before exhausting it. Visual SEO Studio is becoming more and more popular and I the number of crash reports due to running out of memory after days of crawling is on the rise. Better put a safety net.
...but I'm digressing.
Time to stop reading, install the latest Visual SEO Studio version, and audit your site. До свидания!