Three weeks after the previous one, here is another release of my preferred SEO software.
I worked under the wood to make the new features work smoothly... ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to introduce you the 0.8.6 release.
Go International: full support for Internationalized Domain Names
The previous release was a huge step toward non-western users having to daily deal with URL-encoded Unicode characters in the URLs, yet there was still something missing to make Visual SEO Studio the best tool for the task.
Today, with seamless support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) the circle is now complete.
IDN domain names seamlessly handled by the SEO tool
The ones most likely to benefit first will be the large user base of SEO professionals from Russian speaking countries; they have more chances to stumble upon IDNs today with the increasing number of .рф domains.
The others will follow suite: IDNs are here to stay and their usage will grow over time.
The feature is unique in Visual SEO Studio, not present in the most known competitor products which cannot even crawl IDN sites.
I don't know how long will it take for competitors to catch up, but today Visual SEO Studio is far ahead of the competition on this front.
A much better memory management
Those of you working with crawl sessions - tens of thousands pages - will surly notice the improvement.
A much better memory manager highly reduces RAM memory consumption and load time of saved sessions already opened. You open a stored session once, and all subsequent accesses to its data will run in no time, without nearly adding further memory usage.
So if you where going to order new hardware for your huge e-commerce site audits, sorry: the excuse doesn't hold any more!
Some changes about applied craw-delay and default courtesy delay
When I integrated a feedback form within the application, one of the first messages I received was a critic about how slow the crawl was for non-administered sites.
The guy was right: have a site set an high crawl-delay, and the interactive crawl took ages and was unusable.
Now maximum supported crawl-delay is 10 seconds (previously was 120).
Less polite, I agree, but still fair. Site owners might like it less, but the alternative is people using really bad behaved competitor site crawlers, so it's a win-win for everyone.
No more than 10s between each page request
Of course, you can always crawl own sites at full speed, so don't forget to list them in the Administered Sites list using your Webmaster Tools credentials!
Oh, by the way, now for administered or local sites, overriding the crawl-delay (with no wait time, as before) is the default behaviour, as it is the most commonly desired option.
An important bug fix for Internationalization
It's embarrassing to admit it, the program due to a trivial bug didn't recognize non UTF-8 character encodings. Now it's fixed.
Sorry gals/guys, I hope no one of you was affected by the problem. According to W3Stats.com, sites using non UTF-8 and non Latin charsets amount to a tiny fraction nowadays, so hopefully not many users stuck needles in Fred shaped voodoo puppets.
Conclusions and What's Next
That's all for now folks, for a detailed list of the changes, please refer to the full release notes.
And now, let's see what's coming next.
There are several features queuing for the next release. I can't promise everything will make it for it, but here is a wish-list:
- A custom filter to extract pages matching a boolean chain of advances search operators (e.g. "contains", "not contains", "contains more than once", etc..)
- Pre-packaged search filters for the most common actions
- Ability to crawl a sitemap or a plain URL list, even of URLs from different sites
- The ability to export XML Sitemap from any table listing a set of pages
- Reviewing the usability of the Create XML Sitemap feature (it already is appreciated, but can be improved)
- Basic integration with Yandex Webmaster Tools APIs (I have to sort out a few doubts about its Terms of Service, first)
- ...and many other usability improvements and fixes
So, did you try the latest Visual SEO Studio version?
Then I'd love hearing your impressions and feedback!