play watch

Site Audit

How to use the Page explorer report

Page Explorer shows you all the raw data collected during the crawl.

How to use SA Page explorer-1

Use any of the preset filters to slice and dice through it as you see fit. Or create your own advanced filters by mixing and matching 250+ available data points.

How to use SA Page explorer-2

Below are some actionable ways to use this report.

Find all affiliate links on a website

Let’s say you’ve acquired a new Amazon affiliate website where the previous site owner had hardcoded all of the affiliate links. Your goal is to find these links so you can change them to yours.

Click on the Advanced filter. Change the rule to Is valid (200) internal HTML page and leave the condition as Yes.

How to use SA Page explorer-7

Next, create a group. Change the rule to External outlinks and set the criteria to contains with a value of “amazon.com”. Since Amazon also uses a shortened domain—amzn.to—create the same rule and set the criteria to contains with the value of amzn.to.

Change the operator from AND to OR.

How to use SA Page explorer-8

Click Apply and you’ll see all the URLs matching these rules.

Compare current crawl with previous crawl

If you’re running regular or scheduled audits of your website, you can compare changes over time based on either pages or a particular issue.

To compare pages, scroll down to the data table and toggle Show changes under the Changes button.

How to use SA Page explorer-9

You’ll be able to see the changes that have occurred since the last crawl. For convenience, filter your results by new, lost, or no change from the All filter results dropdown to.

How to use SA Page explorer-10

To compare individual issues, you can also filter crawl results based on numerical, boolean, or text changes in fields. This opens up a few use cases.

Monitor content decay

See which content pages experience a decrease in traffic (also known as content decay) beyond a certain threshold.

Let’s take Ahrefs’ blog and check for articles that lost at least 10% of their organic traffic. Click on Advanced filter. Then change the rule to Organic traffic with the operator Dropped by at least (%) set to 10%.

How to use SA Page explorer-11

From here, we can prioritize the 35 potential articles by sorting them after the absolute traffic numbers under the Changes column.

How to use SA Page explorer-12

Check for non-indexable pages

Pages with a noindex tag prevent search engines from discovering them. In the long term, such pages will not pass any link equity to other pages.

To check for pages that became non-indexable, click on Advanced filter. Change the rule to Is indexable page with the value Changed to No.

How to use SA Page explorer-13

Remove the noindex tag if not placed on purpose.

Check for re-written meta descriptions

Google rewrites meta descriptions in 62.78% cases.

To check if Google isn’t displaying the original meta description, click on Advanced filter. Change the rule to Meta description set to Changed.

How to use SA Page explorer-14

Compare HTML & page text changes between crawls

Pinpoint SEO issues with accuracy.

Our SiteAuditBot crawls and stores historical HTML & text snapshots of each page, so you can compare raw vs. rendered code and changes in the text copy of a page.

Let’s take our recently updated About us page. To check the changes in HTML code:

  1. Open the View source tab under the URL details panel of a page
  2. Select Rendered HTML
  3. Select a date under the historical crawl dropdown

How to use SA Overview-8

The code that was deleted is highlighted in red, while text that was added is highlighted in green.

NOTE

If you don’t want Ahrefs SiteAuditBot to store a snapshot of your page, you can add the noarchive tag in your robots.txt file.

Visualize hreflang issues as a link network

Investigate hreflang issues with ease.

Open the URL details panel of a page and click on the Hreflangs tab to see the whole hreflang cluster of a page.

How to use SA Overview-9

Errors with pages and links are highlighted in red, which lets you quickly spot which link is missing or was added by mistake.



Next lesson

Page Explorer Advanced Filters