September 2023 - including Health Scores in Looker Studio, Orphaned Page report improvements, new Data Explorer dimensions, non-reciprocated hreflang reports and AI-generated solutions for accessibility

Health Scores in Looker Studio

Release Date: September 28 2023

To enable you to track and report internally on high-level site performance, we’ve included health score data in the Google Looked Studio (formerly Data Studio) connector.

You can now choose any of the overview, category or subcategory health scores as a data type in Looker Studio dashboards:

Selected Metrics Shown First in Metric Selector

Release Date: September 19 2023

Flatten Shadow DOM

Release Date: September 14 2023

Shadow DOM is a browser tool that allows web developers to add re-usable components on a web page which have their own styling, such as a video player.

When Google renders a page, it flattens the shadow DOM and light DOM content. This means Google can only see the shadow DOM content that's visible in the rendered HTML and not the content of the light DOM.

We have added a new crawl setting to flatten the shadow DOM during rendering. When the setting is enabled, the content of the shadow DOM which is visible in the browser will be merged into the main DOM before we extract crawl data from the page.

You can access this setting in the JavaScript Rendering section of Advanced Settings, in step 4 of the crawl setup process.

Orphaned Page Report Improvements

Release Date: September 11 2023

We’ve made a number of improvements to the Orphan Page reports in the Lumar platform. Please note that these changes will impact health scores (see below).

• New Report - Indexable Orphaned Web Pages: This report brings forward pages that were identified during the web crawl but lack anchors from other pages discovered during the same crawl. These pages will have been discovered via non-anchor link types, such as canonical tags.
• All-Encompassing View with 'All Orphan Pages': We've introduced the 'All Orphan Pages' report. This is a consolidated, de-duplicated list, capturing all orphan pages from every source, ensuring you don't miss any isolated page.
• Focus on Indexable Pages: We've tightened the scope of all Orphan Pages reports to only include indexable pages. The rationale is straightforward: non-indexable pages don't contribute to SEO, so it's more valuable to concentrate on the pages that do.
• Web Crawl Dependency: To maintain the accuracy of the Orphan Pages reports, they will now only be generated for projects that have undergone a web crawl. This is essential because we need the web crawl data to accurately determine which pages lack links. Additionally, specific source-related Orphan Pages reports will be generated only if that particular source was part of the crawl.
• Revamped Orphan Pages Chart: The updated Orphan Pages chart now displays all Orphan Pages reports corresponding to each crawl source included in the project, culminating in the 'All Orphan Pages' report that represents the total count.

Orphaned Pages Impact on Health Scores

We have changed the following Orphaned Pages reports to relate to indexable pages only:

• Orphaned Search Console Pages
• Orphaned List Pages
• Orphaned Pages in Analytics
• Orphaned Pages with Backlinks
• Orphaned Sitemaps Pages
• Orphaned Log Summary Pages
• All Orphaned Pages

The following error report has been created:

• Indexable Orphaned Web Pages

These changes will impact the Discoverability, Internal Linking and Overall SEO Health Scores:

• The reports have been now limited to just Indexable pages which means that you will potentially see less pages in these reports and your Health Score might improve.
• The new Indexable Orphaned Web Pages report might have negative impact on Health Scores.
• The reports are now conditional on the actual Sources that are enabled for a given crawl e.g. when you don't have Google Search Console enabled then the "Orphaned Search Console Pages" report won't be generated. If you do not include the web crawl, none of the reports will be generated. This is likely to have a positive impact on your Health Scores.

AI-Generated Suggested Accessibility Solutions

Release Date: September 7 2023

You can now get AI-generated suggestions on how to fix accessibility issues within the Lumar platform. The new functionality has been enabled in the platform in beta, so we can review responses and check for any quality issues that may arise from using AI to generate the suggestions and make improvements. 

As such, please note that these suggestions should be considered as guidance, and you should look carefully at the suggestion to make sure it’s the right solution for your site.

We’re looking at how we can utilize AI for suggested solutions to technical SEO issues, but as those issues are usually complex and interlinked, we want to make sure that our approach will create useful and accurate results. Watch this space!

Find out more about the AI-generated suggested solutions for accessibility.

New Data Explorer Dimensions

Release Date: September 7 2023

Data Explorer allows you to quickly summarize millions of rows of crawl data in seconds, to streamline your workflows, gain unique insights into crawl data and quickly communicate SEO issues to other stakeholders.

Previously, we had four primary dimensions available: HTTP Status Code; Level; Segment; and Path.

Now, you can select from any of the following additional dimensions:

For ease of selection, we’ve left the original four dimensions (HTTP Status Code, Level, Segment and Path) at the top of the list.

Customizable Project Row Count

Release Date: September 7 2023

To help navigate your projects more easily, you can now increase the number of projects you see when viewing a list of projects. This is available in the All Projects, Running Crawls, Scheduled Projects and Test Suites views, and you can increase the number up to 100 per page.

Filter Projects by Crawl Source

Release Date: September 7 2023

To help you quickly find the projects you need, we’ve added new filter options to the project list. Now you can find projects based on the crawl sources included in projects (such as Sitemaps or Google Search Console).

Preview for Editing Segments

Release Date: September 7 2023

When editing a segment, we’ve added the ability for you to preview a sample of matching URLs so you can check that your rules are pulling in the correct pages - just like when creating a new segment.

Once you’ve set the rules for your segment, just click on the ‘Preview Segment’ button in the bottom left corner to see a sample of up to 50 URLs from the latest crawl that will be matched to the segment in future crawls.

Anchor Text for Broken Links

Release Date: September 7 2023

To help you analyze broken links more effectively, we’ve added Anchor Text to the Internal Broken Links and External Broken Links reports in Analyze.

Crawl Sidebar Reorganization

Release Date: September 7 2023

To make it easier to get to move around Analyze, we’ve reordered the top section of the left hand navigation for projects to a more logical order.

The categorization of technical SEO and accessibility dashboards in the rest of the left navigation remains the same.

Non-Reciprocated Hreflang Reports

Release Date: September 6 2023

To improve the metrics and analysis we provide for internationalization we’ve added two new reports to identify non-reciprocated hreflang links.

The two new reports are:

• Pages with Non-Reciprocated Hreflang Links.

  Indexable pages with 1 or more hreflang links found on the page or in Sitemaps where the hreflang target URL was also included in the crawl and does not have a reciprocal hreflang pointing back to the original URL.

• All Non-reciprocated Hreflang Links

  Hreflang links found on pages and in Sitemaps where the hreflang target URL was also included in the crawl and does not have a reciprocal hreflang pointing back to the original URL.

You’ll find the new reports in the Internationalization subcategory, under Discoverability.

Found at URL Linked to Page Details

Release Date: September 6 2023

The ‘Found At URL’ metric, which shows the first URL where a page was found during the web crawl, is now linked to the page details view.

URL Component Metrics

Release Date: September 6 2023

We’ve exposed the URL component metrics, which were available in the data explorer Path view, as regular metrics. Each URL is broken down into the URL Protocol (such as http/https), URL Domain, and the first 8 paths or parameters as URL Components 1 through 8.

The metrics are available now as filters in reports and segments, or can be added as columns to any report based on the URLs which were included in the crawl.

URL Design Reports

Release Date: September 6 2023

We’ve added 5 new reports to flag issues caused by URL design formats.

• Indexability > Non-Indexable > Pages with Repeated Paths - A URL which contains the same path repeated 3 or more times will not be indexed in Google (e.g. example.com/path/path/path)
• Rankability > URLs with Underscores - Google parses URLs for text, which is broken by the use of underscores so they recommend using hyphens as a separator.
• Uniqueness > Double Encoded URLs - URLs which are double encoded may be a mistake when links are generated. Double encoding is not necessarily an issue provided it’s used consistently but may be an indication of an mistake.
• Uniqueness > Duplicate URLs/URL Sets - URLs may be duplicated for a number of reasons (such as character case differences, parameter ordering, encoding, etc.). By creating a ‘normalized’ URL which resolves all these differences, we can detect examples of duplication caused by the URL design.

Deprecated Reports

Release Date: September 6 2023

As Google stopped supporting pagination detection from rel next/prev tags, we’re going to deprecate the Unlinked Paginated Pages report. You’ll still see the report in the platform for the time being, with a suffix of DEPRECATED. The report will then be removed on December 1st.

As announced back in May, the reports listed below have been removed from the Lumar platform, and will no longer be generated. You can see the reasons for these being removed in our Deprecated and Changed Reports page.

• Broken JS/CSS
• Disallowed JS/CSS
• Disallowed JS/CSS (Uncrawled)
• Broken Pages with Traffic
• Indexable Pages with Search Impressions
• Indexable Pages without Search Impressions
• Mobile App Links
• Non-indexable Pages with Search Impressions

Pages with Adult Rating Report

Release Date: September 6 2023

Google will try to automatically detect pages which contain explicit content and prevent from appearing in their search results for some users with SafeSearch enabled. You can also help Google recognize them by adding an adult rating meta tag.

We’ve added a new metric, and a new report to flag pages with an adult rating meta tag, which will be available in all fresh crawls. You'll find the report in the Page Content subcategory, in Rankability.

Sort Table Columns in Monitor

Release Date: September 4 2023

To help you quickly identify the biggest issues or changes across your domains or site sections, we’ve added the ability to sort the columns in the Monitor dashboard by the total number of URLs, or the absolute change.

By clicking onto the column actions (three dots) in the column header, you can now choose what to sort by and the sort order. One sorted, you’ll also then see an indicator to show which column the table is sorted by.

You can also use the sort option on the right hand side to select which column to sort by, and the relevant sort options.