A segment is a named group of the URLs of one site, for example Blog, Product pages or Broken pages in the shop. Once a site has segments, Site Pages can show one segment at a time, count each segment, mark its pages resolved and download them together. A segment is a way to look at the URLs PerfBee already has: making or changing one does not start a scan and costs no credits.
Make a segment
- Open Site Crawler, then Site Pages, and pick the site.
- Press Create a segment (or Manage segments once there are some), then New segment.
- Give it a name and add one or more URL rules. A URL is in the segment when it matches any of the rules.
- Optionally narrow it with conditions: a status (for example Broken), a type (for example Page) or indexability. A URL must meet all of them. A segment needs at least one URL rule or one condition.
- Watch the preview under the form. It says how many URLs of each Site Pages view the rules hold and shows a few of them. Nothing is saved until you press Create segment.
A site can have 20 segments, and a segment 5 URL rules. A name has up to 60 characters, a pattern up to 200. Two segments of a site cannot have the same name.
What a rule looks at
Rules look at what comes after the domain name: the path and the query string. For https://www.example.com/blog/post?page=2 that is /blog/post?page=2. If you added your site with a folder, such as https://www.example.com/shop/, the folder is part of that text: write /shop/blog/**. The address with or without www., and with http or https, counts as the same site. A link to another site never matches a URL rule. A segment made of conditions only, with no URL rule, takes every URL that meets them, links to other sites included.
Glob rules
A glob starts with / and has to match the whole of that text.
*stands for anything inside one folder,**for anything at all, slashes included, and?for one character other than a slash./blog/**is everything below/blog/./blog/*is the pages directly in/blog/./products/**/reviewsis everyreviewspage in a folder below/products/, such as/products/shoes/reviews, but not/products/reviewsitself.- To match a star or a question mark itself, put a backslash before it:
/search\?q=*. - A glob can hold up to 8 wildcards.
Regex rules
A regular expression is searched anywhere in the same text, so start it with ^ and end it with $ to pin it. For example ^/products/[0-9]+$ is the pages whose address is /products/ followed by a number and nothing else, such as /products/42. PerfBee reads a safe subset: literal characters, ., classes like [a-z0-9-], \d, groups, |, ^, $ and the repeats * + ? {2} {2,} {2,5}. It does not read lookahead, back references, lazy repeats, \w and \s, or a repeated group that contains another repeat or a |. The form tells you which part to change.
PerfBee also tries a regular expression on your site's URLs before it saves the segment. If that takes too long, the segment is not saved: use a simpler pattern or a glob.
Use a segment
- Filter: the Segment menu in the Site Pages filters shows each segment with a count. Choose one and the list shows only its URLs, together with any other filter you set. Clear filters removes it.
- Link to it: the address of the page names the segment, so you can bookmark it or send it to a teammate who has access to the workspace. The link opens the Pages view narrowed to the segment. If the segment was deleted since, the whole list opens with a note.
- Mark resolved: tick the box at the top of the first column. When more URLs match than the page shows, press Select all N matching in the bar that appears (N is the number of URLs), then press Mark resolved. It marks all matching URLs, not only the rows on the page, and none outside the segment. If more than 50,000 URLs match, PerfBee marks none and says to narrow the filters first.
- Download: a CSV or Excel (.xlsx) file from the Export menu keeps the segment filter. Downloads are for Starter and up. When a site has segments, the file has a Segment column with the names of the segments each URL belongs to, separated by semicolons. A URL can be in several segments.
Viewers of a workspace can use the Segment menu but cannot make, change or delete segments. Live links for Google Sheets do not take a segment: while a segment is chosen, the Export menu does not offer one.
Good to know
- A segment holds rules, not URLs. When a scan finds new pages that match, they are in the segment at once; when you change a rule, the segment changes at once.
- The count next to each segment follows the view you are looking at (Pages, Resources, Links out or Not in latest scan), the folder and the search text. The other filters, such as status or issue, do not change it.
- On a very large site a segment's rules can become too slow to count. The menu then shows the segment names without counts. Open Manage segments and edit the segments that use a regular expression, or a glob that mixes
**with*or?. The preview says when the rules are too slow. Use a simpler pattern, or a glob with only**or only*and?. - Segments are separate from the Structure tab, which keeps showing folders as before.