The Changes tab of a crawl report shows what changed since an earlier crawl of the same site. By default it compares with the previous completed crawl. Compare with… lets you pick any other completed crawl of the site instead, for example the one from before a redesign. Viewing the comparison costs no credits and is on every plan; the download is on Starter and up.
Compare with a crawl you pick
- Open Site Crawler, open a completed crawl from your scans and go to its Changes tab.
- Press Compare with…. The list holds your other completed crawls of the same site (
www.and the bare domain count as one site) that were made in the same mode. Press Compare beside the one you want. - To go back, press Compare with the previous scan.
A Fast crawl is compared only with Fast crawls and a Detailed crawl only with Detailed crawls, because a Fast crawl stores no page data. The later of the two crawls is the one that has changed: if you pick a crawl that is newer than the one you opened, a note says that changes read from the one you opened to the one you picked.
What it compares
- Detailed crawls are compared on pages and on broken links: New broken links, Gone pages, Changed pages (status, title, meta description, indexability or canonical), New pages and Fixed links.
- Fast crawls are compared on broken links only (New broken links and Fixed links), and the tab says so.
- A page the later crawl did not reach is not called gone, and a link that was broken before and was not checked again is not called fixed. A note above the lists says how many were left out and why, for example when the later crawl stopped early or covered less of the site.
Long lists and big crawls
- Each list shows its first 500 rows. The number beside its title and the tiles above it count every row. When a list is cut, a line under it says Showing the first 500 of … and points you to the download.
- A comparison of two Detailed crawls is made page by page only while both crawls have at most 25,000 pages. For bigger crawls only broken links are compared, and a note above the lists says so; the page lists are empty, which does not mean nothing changed.
- A comparison that takes longer than 20 seconds stops with a message. Compare crawls with fewer pages, or try again in a minute.
Download the comparison
The Export button in the bar above the tab downloads the comparison you are looking at as CSV or Excel (Starter and up). The file holds every row of every list, not only the first 500: one row for each change, with its address, what changed and the value before and after, and it names the crawl it was compared against. The download uses no credits.
The download is refused, with a message that says why, when it would not be complete: for a pair of Detailed crawls that is too big to compare page by page (more than 25,000 pages, as above), or when a list is cut short. Nothing is exported then, because a file with missing rows would read as if nothing else changed.