Scrutiny 12 Important configuration

Tune these important settings to scan your site properly

If your first scan didn't proceed or finish as expected, here are some important settings which may need changing to suit your site.

The default settings of these controls will suit most sites, but read the descriptions below and decide whether you may need to change them.

Ignore querystrings

The querystring is information within the url of a page. It follows a '?' - for example www.mysite.co.uk/index.html?thisis=thequerystring. If you don't use querystrings on your site, then it won't matter whether you set this option. If your page is the same with or without the querysrting (for example, if it contains a session id) then check 'ignore querystrings'. If the querystring determines which page appears (for example, if it contains the page id) then you shouldn't ignore querystrings, because Scrutiny won't crawl your site properly.

If you have to allow querystrings because there's a page id in there, but a session id or some other parameter is causing the crawl to go on for ever, then Scrutiny now has the option to ignore only the session id (or another single parameter). See the 'Advanced' tab

Page URLs have no file extensions

Some content management systems have urls where a page name is included in the starting url but has no file extension. eg mysite.com/mypage/ If this is your starting url, Scrutiny cannot know whether this is a directory or a page. If a directory, Scrutiny would limit its scan to the directory /mypage/. If it's a page then the scan would be limited to mysite.com. This situation is auto-detected, you should be asked the question if necessary, but you are able to manually change the setting here if necessary.

Ignore trailing slash

foo.com is considered the same as foo.com/ with this setting switched on. For most sites it'll be correct to leave this setting on, but some sites are touchy about the trailing slash being present or not.

Site is inaccessible without clientside rendering

If a page requires javascript to populate some or all content, it may display its 'noscript' text in browsers that have javascript disabled and that may be what Scrutiny sees. If your site requires javascript to be switched on before content or navigation links are visible then Scrutiny can render the page before scanning the page.

Check 'Site is inaccessible without clientside rendering' to switch on this feature. The scan will be slower and use far more resources, so only use this option if you're absolutely sure that it's absolutely necessary.

Note that 'onload' script will be executed, but Scrutiny can't perform user actions like clicking menus, scrolling or trawl through javascript searching for links.