Past reads and history

Past crawls is the record of everything that has happened to a site's audit. Its description says what it's for:

Everything that has happened to this site audit, newest first — each time Rankbank read the site, and what changed as a result. Useful for checking whether a fix actually helped.

That last clause is the whole reason to open the page.

The activity feed

One card, titled Activity, with the note "Newest first. If it's empty, nothing has run yet — start with an audit."

Each event shows:

• Its title, saying what happened
• A line of metadata: the kind of event, its status, and when it happened
• A summary of what it produced or changed
• An Open button, when there's somewhere to go

The Open button is the part that makes the feed navigable rather than just readable. An event about a read opens what that read produced. Following it is usually faster than working out the same thing from the current state of the site.

Using it to check whether a fix helped

This is the workflow the page exists for, and it takes about a minute.

You fixed something. Maybe you rewrote forty titles, or added internal links to a page that had none, or repaired a batch of broken links. The question is whether it worked, and "the score went up" is not a satisfying answer on its own.

1. Open Past crawls and find the read you ran before the work.
2. Find the read you ran after it.
3. Compare what each one reported.

For the short version of the same question, your Overview has a Since your last read panel comparing only the two most recent reads: health moved from one number to another, so many new findings appeared, so many are no longer true. That's enough when you're working week to week.

This page is for the longer view. Three months in, "when did the orphan pages appear?" and "did the title work in June actually do anything?" are questions only the history can answer, and answering them from memory is how people end up redoing work.

What the empty state means

Before anything has run you get No Site Intelligence history yet: "Run your first audit and every step will start showing up here."

If that's what you're seeing, nothing has read your site yet. Go to the Read this site again panel at the bottom of the Overview and press Start the audit. See how Rankbank reads your site.

Nothing here runs on its own

That's a design decision rather than a missing feature, and it has a useful consequence: a gap in this feed is a gap in your habit, not a service that went quiet. If your last read was in June, the reason is that nobody has read it since June.

A rhythm that works for most sites is to read after each batch of changes rather than on a fixed day. Ship, read, check Since your last read on the Overview, work the next three findings. The history then reads as a record of work rather than a record of a timer, which is far more useful when someone asks what you did last quarter.

Where else the record shows up

The history feed is the complete record, but three other places carry pieces of it:

• Since your last read on your Overview compares the two most recent reads in four bullets.
• Since the last read on the Problems to fix page counts problems as New, Still there, Fixed and Came back.
• The Fixed and Came back tiles on that same page carry the longer-running memory of which problems have been resolved and which returned.

A problem sitting in Came back usually has a matching story in this feed: fixed on one read, present again on a later one. When that happens, the fix didn't stick, and the cause is nearly always a template change or a deploy that reverted it rather than anything about the page itself.