We noticed there were certain times when the extension took a little long to open up.

We fixed it.

Incorporated a whole bunch of caching and async loading of external checks to improve the speed of the extension opening up and showing the data you're looking for.

In our first iteration of the robots checker, we only checked against the Meta Robots tag to figure out if the page you were viewing gave a direction to the robots to “index”, “noindex”, “follow” or “nofollow” the page you were viewing.

Of course we added appropriate red, orange and green icons to help you quickly identify the status, but we knew we could do better.

So with this update we also:

• Do a live check against the robots.txt file. When you visit a URL impacted by an "Allow" or "Disallow" directive in robots.txt, the extension will display the exact rule, allowing you to copy it or view the live robots.txt file effortlessly.
  
  Additionally, the entire robots.txt file will be shown with the relevant rule highlighted (if applicable). With one click you can open up the robots.txt itself, or copy it to your clipboard. Pretty neat, right? 
• Look at the x-robots-tag headers. Identifying robots directives in the HTTP header used to be challenging, but not anymore with this extension.
  
  Any particular exclusions will be clearly highlighted, along with the complete HTTP header, making the specific exclusions easy to spot! And of course you can also copy the full HTTP header to your clipboard to easily share with your development team.

So with this update you can be sure to save some more time again, by understanding whether a particular page on your website is accessible to search engines yes or not.

In Sprout SEO, up until now, we would assume that the sitemap of any website was located on /sitemap.xml and link to it from the bottom part of the page info tab.

But you know what they say about assumptions...

So we fixed that, what we do right now is:

#1 We check if there is a sitemap on the default location
#2 Check if the sitemap is referenced correctly from the robots.txt
#3 If the sitemap is present and referenced in the robots.txt, all green ✅
#4 If there is no sitemap on the default location and no reference in the robots.txt 🚨
#5 If there is a sitemap on the default location but no reference in the robots.txt ⚠️

Oh, and if multiple sitemaps are found in the robots.txt, we list them all in the extension.

Next to these, we've added two handy extra features in the right-click menu that work in the Google Search Results Page (SERP):

##Remove breadcrumbs from the SERP

The option to remove the 'breadcrumbs', which replace URLs in search results and give you back the full URL of the page you're trying to visit.

This is incredibly useful when performing site:domain.com searches, and you want to see if strange URLs appear in search results.

##Add position numbers in front of search results in the SERP

Getting tired of counting results in the SERP to see at which position you or your competitor ranks?

We've added a little Google SERP Counter that adds the position of a result next to the search results on Google.  Like this you can immediately see at what position you are.

Small bugfix 🐛 release

Small bugfix 🐛 release

Small bugfix 🐛 release

Living in a country with three official languages (Belgium), makes me fully aware of the issues that incorrect Hreflang tags can have on your rankings.

This update is designed to automate the process of checking a site's Hreflang tag deployment.

With this update, we take a readout of a URL's Hreflang tags and then crawl them to assess if they back reference your current URL.

This saves precious time when it comes to assessing a site's language targeting and Hreflang architecture, allowing you to get a fast and reliable impression of the status of a site's optimization for international organic search.

We all know the importance of links on your pages. So, this edition is fully focused on making you understand all the links found on any page.

Are they working, leading to a 404 page or maybe to a redirect?

We've added a new tab called "Links".

Here you can:

• See the total amount of links, the total amount of unique links, the number of internal and external links
• Highlight all internal links on the page, or highlight all the external links on a page
• Export all internal or external links into a CSV
• Get an overview of the extension of all the internal and external links, together with their anchor text and HTTP status code.

When highlighting all internal or external links on a page, it shows a little pop-up on the page with color coding explaining the number of links:

• with a query string at the end
• with a no-follow tag
• blocked by robots
• to a page that has a redirect
• to a page that gives a client error
• to a page that gives a server error

Highlighting of all external and internal links is also possible from the newly created contextual or "right click" menu on any page, together with the options from the right click menu to:

• Test the current page in the Rich Results tester
• Test the current page with the schema.org validator
• Perform a site:domain.com search
• Perform a -inurl:https Google search
• Test your speed on WebPageTest
• Test your speed on GTMetrix
• Test your speed on Page speed insights
• Test your speed on Lighthouse
• View the current site on Ahrefs
• View the current site on Archive.org
• View the current site on BuzzSumo
• View the current site in Majestic
• View the current site on Moz
• View the current site on Semrush
• View the current site on SimiliarWeb
• View the current site in Sistrix

We'll save you seconds - dozens or hundreds of times per day - which quickly adds up.

Oh, and we've got one more trick up our sleeves...

From now on, you will get an overview of all the headings on a page, so not just the amount of H1's, H2's, etc., but also the actual headings with the option to export or copy them.

We all know that just creating content isn't enough. 

Content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice.

If you want traffic and conversion, you need to make sure your content looks as sexy outside your website as it does on it.

That means having the right OG:Image tags for example.

This release shows you the Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards on any page you're on.

You might also have heard about Reddit's growing importance in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

So, we've included an easy way to see if the current URL is already shared on any subreddit. Like this, you can jump right into the discussion if the link has already been submitted.

Otherwise, a "Submit this link" is provided for a link to the Reddit submission page.

And if you're just starting out on your Reddit journey, this is also an excellent way to start building up some karma by submitting interesting content to the platform.

Big version numbers, mean big changes!

This version introduces a name change from the "Technical SEO Rich Results & Schema Validator" to "Sprout SEO."

A new name, as the extension, will be way more than just an easy way for you to handle schema markup on your website and snoop on the schema of your competitors to improve yours.

So, what else has changed with version 3.0?

#1 Check the most important on-page SEO data

Analyze the on-page SEO elements of any page and find potential issues. The on-page shows you the following:

• Title and description (including JS rendered) and their character lengths
• The URL
• Canonical URL check
  
• Pagewide noindex/nofollow directives for crawlers (in meta tags and HTTP headers)
  
• Core Web Vital (Largest Contentful Paint - LCP + First Input Delay - FID + Cumulative Layout Shift - CLS) using CrUX data
• Word Count + the ability to export the page copy
• A quick overview of the amount of headings, links, and images on a page
• Sitemaps and robots.txt files
  
• You can see if your page can be indexed or has a canonical issue by looking at the status icon in your extension bar.

#2 Trace redirect paths and read HTTP headers easily

See if you have reached the destination page via a redirect and trace the entire redirect chain, including JS redirects.

• It allows you to read the HTTP headers of the URL easily, which may be challenging for casual browser users
  
• See the full path including their HTTP status code on how you arrived on your destination page
• See the HTTP status code of the page you're currently on via the icon in your browser's extension bar

#3 Migrations gone wrong? Export a CSV of all known URLs from archive.org

We all know the times when a client has approached you about a website migration that went wrong.

So can you recover? 

How can you figure out all the old URLs easily, without putting back a backup of the website?

Well, if your website is archived on archive.org from the "other tools" section, you can now create a CSV file of all known URLs straight from archive.org so you can start building your redirect mapping and get those rankings back how they should be.