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After releasing the beta version of SEO Checker almost two months ago, it’s time for a release candidate. An exciting time because if all goes well we have the final release available in just a few weeks(it’s all about writing the user manual ). The release candidate solves the following issues found in the beta version:

• Fixed encoding issues in the validation process
• Added a validator to prevent robots.txt, or meta follow/index  is blocking the whole site being crawled
• If a robots.txt file exist on disk, use that one instead of generating a dynamic one
• Fixed several issues regarding  url rewriting
• Fixed several issues regarding broken inbound links
• Changed low level error messages to user friendly ones when an exception occurs
• Added several improvements in configuration
• Fixed Umbraco V6 RC compatibility issues

If you already installed SEO Checker beta it’s best to upgrade since the beta expires February 1th and upgrading is easy, just use the package installer. So what are you waiting for….download the RC today

Non production Warning:
This is a  release candidate!! SEO checker is tested on different sites but can still have some issues in specific situations. We love to get some feedback but don't use this package in production! If you find any issues please send us an email support@soetemansoftware.nl and we will get back to you ASAP!  Also keep an eye on our hotfix location! Here you find the most recent bugfixes.  The release candidate will expire on May 1th 2013. After May 1th it will fall back to trial mode which means it will only work on localhost and you can only validate one page at a time.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about SEO Checker. With the first release candidate and final release around the corner it’s time to highlight some features. Today I want to talk about fixing Inbound Links.We all had this experience, searching for information and found a page in Google and when we hit that link we get a 404 page, friendly message or not it’s not the best experience and Google doesn’t like this either.

In the example below I’m using the basic starter kit that comes with Umbraco and visit the page gofurther.aspx. the 404 page will be shown, but SEO Checker will also log the url.  When you open the  Inbound link error page in SEO Checker you will see that gofurther.aspx is reported as broken. Using the content picker you can select the page you want to redirect to. Next time someone is visiting the gofurther.aspx the request is redirected to the selected page.

Handling different extensions

If you migrate a site from php environment you can setup the same structure in your umbraco site. Let’s say the previous php site had this structure:

• mytestsite.com/
  • mytestsite.com/installing-modules.php
  • mytestsite.com/go-further.php
  • mytestsite.com/getting-started.php

Our new Umbraco site is using aspx extensions (or no extensions at all), so when we try to access the installing-modules.php page, the visitor will see a 404 page.  If you have SEO Checker installed it will make sure the installing-modules.php page will be redirected to the installing-modules.aspx page.

This means search results from Google will still work (and get updated to the new page because of the 301 redirect) and all links to the php version of your site will still work.

When the page cannot be found at all the url will be logged and we can map the correct url on the Inbound Links page as described in the previous scenario.

Handling structure changes

When you rename or move a document in Umbraco the structure will change. For example when we change the Installing modules page to Installing Umbraco modules. The url changes from installing-modules.aspx to installing-umbraco-modules.aspx. The result will be that when people are visiting the old installing-modules.aspx  url, they will see a 404 instead of the Page. SEO Checker will keep track of changes in the url structure and will redirect the old installing-modules.aspx  url to the new installing-umbraco-modules.aspx url.

If you are only interested in this scenario you might want to check out the free 301 Url Tracker package.