Scrutiny 12 Preferences and global settings
You choose
General
Tolerance
It's pretty common for pages to contain relative links like '../somepage.html' where ../ means 'directory above'. If this literally takes the user above the domain, then this is technically an error. Most browsers will be tolerant to this and assume that you mean the root (which you probably do). But it's a situation you might want to know about and fix. 'Ignore ../ that travels above the domain' will cause Scrutiny to be tolerant to this in the same way that browsers usually are.
Local files
If you're scanning your site locally rather than by http, then a link to a directory ( peacockmedia.software/mac/scrutiny/ ) has no filename. It's valid when using the web because the server will return the index page or redirect to it, but for local crawling we have to assume the filename. It's usually something like index.html
Your server may or may not be case-sensitive. If it is, then you will want to 'Check for case' when scanning locally. If your server isn't case-sensitive and you're not bothered about 'fixing' links which will work fine in the browser, then leave this setting off.
Options
Autosave
With Autosave switched on, data is autosaved for each site you scan (only the most recent scan for each of your sites). Beware if you scan a very large site, this will use a significant amount of disc space. As an alternative, you can save data manually when you choose File > Save Data and load back in using File > Open.
Only the data for the most recent scan of any site is kept, but your autosaved data can build up if you scan large sites or scan different sites regularly. You can manage this data using Tools > Manage Autosave Data (⌘5).
Check for soft 404s
A 'soft 404' is a page that looks like an error page, but which returns a 200 response code. The page may say 'Page not found' or it may be a default page such as the home page or a special page set up for the purpose.
If the page doesn't state that the requested page hasn't been found then it's confusing for the visitor. Unless the page returns a 404 or 410 code then it's very difficult for a web crawler to find the broken link.
Google doesn't like such pages - they don't want to index a page which isn't the intended page. It's best if your site returns a 404 or 410 code when a page isn't found.
If your site does return soft 404s or if you want to find your external links that link to soft 404s, then Scrutiny can try to spot and highlight them. It does this by searching for certain text on the page (such as 'page not found'). If you know that your site generates these soft 404s then switch the feature on and type a piece of unique text, which is only found on your soft 404 page (such as 'page not found') into the box.
Views
Display 'Appears on' as
Certain columns of certain tables show which page each occurence of each link appears on. These columns can display the url or the title of the page in question.
Redirects
It's not uncommon for a link's url to redirect to another page. Maybe even more than one redirect before reaching its final destination. Some webmasters like to correct links so that they point at that final destination. Others don't consider this a problem at all. If you like, you can switch off the reporting of such redirects and only see the final url and status.
Labels
'Labels' refers to the colouring of the table rows - red means a server error (a 5xx server response code) or a client error (4xx server response code). orange is a warning, usually meaning a redirect (3xx server response code). Click the colour wells to change the colours if you want to. You can switch off the colour labelling altogether. If you don't want to see the orange warning for redirects, you can change the colour to white or transparent, or if you're not interested in redirects at all, you can switch this feature off on the Preferences > Links tab.
When scanning a secure (https) site
There are many ways that Scrutiny can help you to find insecure links or insecure content - details are here.
Validation
As mentioned above in Views, you can control whether pages with warnings are coloured orange. But the warnings will still be recorded and displayed in the Warnings tab and in the link inspector for each URL.
Here you can limit its activity or turn the feature off altogether. If you don't want to use the validation (eg a faster link check or sitemap generation) this makes the scan more efficient.
Sitemap
Here are some basic settings which configure the xml sitemap file that Scrutiny produces. You can include images if you like, and include pdf files as if they were web pages. Note that, at present, if you change the lastmod or pdf setting, you'll need to re-scan.
You can also edit the template which wraps your urls in the xml file
SEO
Here are the thresholds that Scrutiny uses for the SEO checks. Google have never been specific about these numbers, so you can decide whether you think these values are too strict or tolerant and adjust accordingly.
Spelling
Content
These settings determine what constitutes 'content'. You might want to include all visible text on the page, or you may want to exclude headers and footers, or just go for content marked as paragraphs and headings.
Note that this definition of 'content' is used in several other places that use the concept of 'page content' such as the soft 404 check, thin content and keyword stuffed SEO checks, and optionally the site search.
Advanced
Connections
These are some obscure or very advanced settings that you shouldn't change. They may be useful in a support situation
Additional js rendering time
If you're having to use the clientside rendering feature (which is unlikely and undesirable) then sometimes it can be necessary to increase the time allowed for rendering the page before the code is gathered.
Reports
Header and styles
Here you can see the html and styles that are used when the summary report is generated. These aren't used when populating the Summary tab within the Scrutiny app, only when exporting to html or pdf.
You can edit these so that your own logo or header appears in the report. If you use an image you must refer to it with an absolute url.
All links should be full All Links view rather than Link URLs
When the report generates 'all_links.csv' for the full report, by default it exports the 'By link' view which shows each link url once. The 'All links' view is more comprehensive (showing every occurrence of each link and which page it appears on). If your site is very large, then the all links table is likely to be extremely long, meaning that it'll be a big export when you export the report.