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, not an iOS app running under Catalyst) 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 is optionally autosaved or manually saved and reloaded - carry on working on broken links or other issues another day without re-scanning
  • These reports can be web-enabled. With the option switched on in Preferences, simply transfer the files to a web server, anyone with a link can view / download. This allows you to provide reports to anyone within an organisation, or (with customisation of logo/header) provide services to your customers.
• 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.