View and analyze the status of each link included in your website. Check for broken links, create a sitemap, search for spelling errors in texts, run SEO analysis scenarios, etc. Manually input the URL and view the results of the automated scan for it.
Scrutiny is a set of web optimization tools that identify those aspects you can improve in your website. In this respect, the app can check for such issues as missing links, faulty SEO data and spelling or grammar mistakes.
The app has a straightforward graphic user interface, which I am sure you will not have any difficulty to use. You can begin by entering the starting URL of your site (or sites). Sometimes, when the site is password-protected, it may be necessary to provide authentication data. Next, you may proceed to scan the site, which means that the tool works like a spider, inspecting every possible link. In addition, for each site, you may set specific scanning rules.
Once the scan is over, the tool shows the results grouped by such categories as Links, Sitemaps, SEO, Spelling and Grammar, Perform Actions, Search Pages, Orphaned Pages, Insecure Contents and Reporting, which you can expand to view in details. The resulting data can be saved for future reference.
One of the areas you find the tool is most useful is by checking the status of the site’s hyperlinks. This is even useful to detect faulty hyperlinks within PDF or Word documents. Similarly, the tool can crawl through the text in all your pages to find spelling or grammar mistakes.
The application can also make your site friendlier to search engines by checking SEO parameters such as URL, title, description and main headings. Likewise, it can find if there is keyword stuffing, when there are too many keywords in the same page, which is penalized by search engines. Besides, it can give you overall stats of each page. Another possibility is to create an XML sitemap you can submit to search engines to enhance your site’s visibility.
Good news is that Scrutiny uses an excellent crawling engine, which supports scanning large sites fast and efficiently. Luckily, you can also limit the scope of the crawl, by setting the number of levels and links as well as creating blacklists and whitelists. Regrettably (or should I say “fortunately”?), it very occasionally reports false-positive broken links.
All in all, Scrutiny can be a great choice if you want to improve your site’s SEO score. By validating HTML and checking SEO parameters, this tool has the potential to improve your site’s ranking in search engines, thus attracting more visitors. Fortunately, there is a trial version functional for 30 days but with limitations in exporting results.
v4.2 [Jul 10, 2013]
improvements to interface for productivity:
- Changes the 'by link' view to an expandable view, occurrences can be seen by expanding view rather than as previously having to open the link inspector
- Link inspector still appears on double-click from link views and is improved
- Adds context menus to the 'by link' and 'by page' views and the 'appears on' table in the link inspector - a number of actions can be performed with a right-click (or control-click) including 'Copy URL' and where appropriate Visit, Highlight and Locate
- The new Copy URL action is available with a command-C and will copy the URL of the selected item
- A new Locate action lists how to click through from the starting url to find the link in question. It is available via context menus, the link inspector and cmd-shift-L
- Adds 'link text' column to 'by page' view
- Change to wording: 'on page' now 'appears on'
- Changes default for highlighting a link on the page - now looks like highlighter pen rather than a box around it (changes prefs defaults to 'background' rather than 'border', and changes the default colour to yellow rather than dark grey - ie (existing users can select this option in prefs if they like))
Also:
- Ignores and continues if 'bad SSL certificate' warning is encountered. But only for the website being tested. (anything else, ie external links, won't be followed anyway)
- If image checking is switched on, now collects alt text and displays in 'link text' columns
- Some options removed from Preferences>Views>By Link view (Status, URL, On Page) because these are needed for the new outline view to work properly
- Exporting from 'by link' view better than previously. (was putting all 'on page' information in a single cell to reflect the view - led to problems due to Excel's 256-character limit)
- Export added to by Page view
- Exports from expandable views reflect the state of the view, ie which rows are expanded or not
