Scrutiny

Scrutiny - full specification

This page is for you if you're evaluating Scrutiny or comparing it with a competitor. Please bear in mind that Scrutiny's licence is a one-off purchase not an annual subscription.

• Interface:
  • Allows multiple windows to be open. Run multiple scans, view data for a different site or set up another site while running a scan.
  • Organise your sites into folders.
  • Autosave feature saves data for every scan, giving you easy access to results for any site you've previously scanned..
• Crawling engine:
  • fast, efficient and native to MacOS (ie not Java) which makes for efficiency and security. If your server can cope, turn up the number of threads and see how fast.
  • handles large sites without slowing down
  • can store a huge amount of information. Tens of thousands of pages containing hundreds of thousands of links, drilling down as many levels as you like.
  • many options for limiting the crawl - by number of levels or links, by blacklisting or whitelisting
  • many options for tailoring the crawl - ignoring querystrings or not, ignoring trailing slashes or not, tolerance to coding errors such as mismatched quotes etc
  • many options for doing other things while crawling; eg archiving, spell-checking
  • search your site for pages containing specific text, or not containing specific text, a single term or multiple terms. Full code search or just the visible text. Now allows Regex expression.
  • better protection when disc space is low, scan should stop before catastrophe happens. Each separate scan that's running will warn and give an option to pause or continue.
  • scan websites which require authentication (signing-in / logging-in)
  • can optionally handle cookies and/or render javascript, making it possible to scan sites that require these things to be enabled
• Link check:
  • option to execute javascript before scanning pages
  • option to scan pdf documents to find links
  • option to check for broken images
  • status for each link clearly displayed (eg '200 no error')
  • support for spotting 'soft 404s' - where 200 is returned despite intended page not being found
  • limit your crawl using blacklisting or whitelisting on url and even terms within the content
  • colour highlighting
  • filter results to show bad links only, Internal links, External links, Images
  • use a context menu for options such as visit url, copy url, highlight link on page, re-check link, mark as fixed
• Check for insecure content and links to old http site (migration to https:// site):
  • See a list of pages which contain links to the http:// version of the site
  • See a list of pages which reference insecure / mixed content (images or other files)
• Test the load speed of a single page to find slow elements or measure total weight
  • See uncompressed and compressed size of files and thus easily see the benefit of the server's gzip service
• Robotize:
  • View a page as a browser sees it - ie text-only, with headings, links, meta data pulled out and listed separately.
  • This tool works neatly as a standalone text-only web browser
• Sitemap:
  • export as XML (conforming to the standard protocol for submission to search engines)
  • For larger sites, the sitemap is generated as a series of files with a sitemap index file (from v6.8.9)
  • FTP the sitemap file(s) to a server after generation
  • View the sitemap as a visualisation within Scrutiny
  • Visualisation now includes 'flyaround' 3d structure
  • export as a .dot file for display in 3rd party visualisation software such as Omnigraffle. (Scrutiny can now display these visualisations using a series of themes, and I now have a separate free app for displaying these visualisations)
• SEO audit:
  • display SEO parameters such as url, title, description, main headings, noindex/nofollow
  • keyword density alerts - see pages with any keyword(s) occurring in the content above a particular threshold ('stuffing'). Double click to see an analysis for that page, checking up to 4 word terms.
  • keyword / phrase analysis - see the count for any word / phrase in url / title / description / content
  • list pages with missing SEO parameters (title, description etc)
  • list pages with possible duplicates (same content, different url)
  • list pages with description too long / too short
  • list pages with title too long (new since v5.6.)
  • list pages with too many links
  • list pages with thin content
  • list pages with mixed content (http:// resources within https:// page)
  • list deep content (greater than X links from home page)
  • Find images with no alt text
  • list pages with redirect chain
  • displays stats for each page such as word count, link count, content size, image count, image weight
• Spelling and grammar:
  • checks for spelling and grammar issues on your pages as it scans
  • Step through those one by one and see suggestions
  • choose the language used by the spell checker on a per-site basis
• Orphan check:
  • Compare pages obtained from server by ftp, with the pages obtained by a crawl, reporting pages that may be orphaned
  • From 7.2, can traverse local files / directories and compare these with http: crawl
• Reporting:
  • Customizable Summary report can be generated after a scheduled or adhoc scan, containing stats about of bad links, SEO problems and spelling / grammar issues
  • Full report contains summary report plus csv's for the main tables
  • Piechart (for links) and radar chart (for SEO) included in the summary report.
  • Custom header can be included in this report so it's ready to submit to a customer or manager
  • Build your own custom reports using external tools - the exported csv files comply with the requirements of Google Data Studio
  • Scrutiny's data can be saved and reloaded - carry on working on broken links or other issues another day without re-scanning
• Website monitoring:
  • set up any number of urls to be tested at a frequency you set
  • if an unexpected response code is received, can alert on-screen, send an email and/or write to a log file
• HTML validation of individual pages using the W3C validator
• Schedule a scan (eg weekly or monthly) to regularly check a site without having to remember
  • Since v5 this is much easier and offers a number of actions which can be taken when the scan completes.
  • Scrutiny doesn't have to be running for the scheduled scan to take place.
• Many export options including full report, sitemap xml, csv for any table, graphic visualisation
• The archive function is now enhanced and can create a browsable local archive as it scans, in a sitesucker-type way
• Manage as many sites as you like with different settings for each
  Improved in v5 - larger icons, sortable columns (name, url or last checked date) and a search box
• See progress via dock icon

Common tasks

The links below will give you more information and brief tutorial

• find and display my site's broken links
• locate a broken link
• limit my crawl using blacklisting / whitelisting
• export an xml sitemap
• use canonical href to exclude duplicates from my xml sitemap
• find missing meta tags
• find duplicate content (same content, different url)
• test the load speed of a page and all of its elements
• Find the slow-loading element that's slowing a page down
• analyse my pages for occurrences of a chosen key word / phrase
• test the html validation of a page or all pages
• test a website which requires authentication
• run scrutiny on schedule

Doesn't do exactly what you'd like? Please let me know.