Content
Site Audit offers many ways to compare changes between two Site Audit crawls. Not only can you compare changes in a page's HTML, or linked pages, you can now compare changes in SERP titles, Organic traffic, Sitemap URLs and more. This makes it easy to monitor the progress being made to a website over time.
Compare changes in the Site Audit Overview
On Site Audit Overview, you can compare the difference in overall Site audit health,
1. Compare stats for all crawls at a glance
Clicking on the project name will show a summary page of every site audit crawl made for this project in the last 12 months, both visually as bar charts, and in a table with relevant stats:
Changes in stats between the crawl before it are shown in green and red:
You can hover over any bar in the charts to see the stats of that crawl, and the date the crawl was made.
2. Choose any two Site Audit Crawls to compare
Site Audit allows you to compare any two crawls by using the dropdowns in the headers:
Some examples of what you can use this for:
Find pages with content that was not updated for many months
Find pages that have traffic dropped significantly compared to half a year ago
Check if there are issues that are still not fixed after multiple rounds of modifications.
3. View changes in Health score across 10 Site Audit crawls
This chart shows up to 10 consecutive crawls and their health scores. The current crawl is highlighted in a stronger colour
Hover over any of the bars in the chart to see each crawl's health score, and date that the crawl is made:
4. Compare changes for each issue between two crawls
The What's new tab shows issues that have increased in number of URLs affected, compared to the previous selected crawl, ordered by importance. The Change, Added, New and Removed columns show differences in URLs between the two crawls. You can hover over each column header for more information:
Top issues tab shows issues with the highest number of URLs affected overall, ordered by importance.
You can click on the All issues report to view the changes between crawls for all issues being tracked:
Compare changes between crawls for any issue
1. View changes in number affected URLs across previously made crawls
The bars with red lines refer to the current crawl, versus the crawl that you're comparing to. Clicking on a different crawl will switch to the same issue report, but on a different date:
Checking the "Highlight new" and "Show lost" boxes allow you to see how many new URLs that have the issue, and how many URLs stopped having the issue respectively:
2. Filter for new, or lost URLs for this issue
To understand how to use these filters, we can take the issue "Title too long" as an example:
All filter results: URLs in the current crawl that have "Title too long" issue.
New in filter results: URLs that did not have "Title too long" issue in the previous crawl, but do in the current crawl.
New: new URLs found this crawl (which were not there in the last crawl) that have "Title too long" issue.
No change: URLs that have "Title too long" issue in the previous and the current crawl.
Lost from filter results: Previously crawled URLs that had "Title too long", but currently do not.
Lost: Previously crawled URLs that had "Title too long" that couldn't be found in this current crawl.
3. Quickly view changes in Organic Traffic
To quickly see if there are any changes in estimated organic traffic for each URL in your site audit report, you can click on the Changes dropdown and turn on the "Show changes" toggle. Here, you can also select if you wish to see the changes as an absolute number or percentage difference:
This will add two columns to your issues report: Organic traffic, and Changes. The number highlighted in green is for the newer crawl. The number highlighted in red is for the older crawl.
In some other issues related to Titles, Sitemaps, page content etc., the report will highlight changes in a similar way. For example, you can view changes in SERP titles, and top keyword that the URL ranks for:
4. Filter for pages that have changed text, numbers, state, and more (using Advanced Filters)
Using the Advanced filter, you can create filter for pages that have
Filter for URLs with numeric fields (Organic traffic, word count, linked pages, etc.) with absolute or percentage rise/drops between two crawls.
Filter for URLs with boolean fields (indexable / non-indexable, is Sitemap indexed, is Page title used in SERP, etc.) that have changed between two crawls.
Filter for URLs with text fields (SERP title, Canonical URL, Schema items) that have changed between two crawls.
Each of the fields that support this filter will have a section in the second dropdown that allows you to pick what kind of "change" you're looking to filter for:
💡 Learn more about how to monitor and track changes using Site Audit.
Compare changes of a single page using the URL details panel
For every page that can be successfully crawled (HTTP response 200), you can click on a URL to open its URL details panel. Then, go to the View source tab:
Here you can view the Raw HTML, Rendered HTML, or the Page text seen by our crawler for that particular URL. You can use the Compare with dropdown to view differences made to the page between two crawls, or even compare between raw and rendered versions:
Red sections refer to content deleted from the older crawl. Green sections refer to content added on the newer crawl:
This is particularly useful to see:
What changes were made to a page that could have affected rankings, or affected a visitor's browsing experience.
Any content, backlinks, etc. that only shows up after javascript is rendered.