We just released version 2.5.0 of our rank checker Serposcope. This update make the UI smoother (especially for group with thousands of keywords), bring new features (partial check, export, backup...), improve the performances and fix a few bugs.

New check system

It is possible to check only recently added keywords and those that could not be checked during the last check (because of a network error or an overloaded capcha breaking service...). This new kind of task only update the previous task (the date of the last check remains unchanged).

Export

CSV export is finally available. You can export the list of URLs of a result page (SERP view / Google ranking) or ranking history of a site over a period. Example :

date,rank,url,target,keyword,device,tld,datacenter,local,custom
2016-05-31,32,https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banque_en_ligne,fr.wikipedia.org,banque en ligne,D,fr,,,
2016-05-31,2,https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livret_A,fr.wikipedia.org,livret a,D,fr,,,

Smoother and faster rendering

Some users had display issues when there were too many keywords on a view. These large tables were completely redone in order to support the display of several thousand of keywords very quickly. Moreover, it is possible to filter and sort the searches on most of the pages where they are present (based on keyword, device, TLD ...).

Chart improved

• The legend has been optimized to take less space when multiple searches or websites are selected.
• The lines are not drawn automatically when too many keywords is present (now must be selected manually).
• Display the best ranking for the tracked websites on the SERP chart.
• A new TOP10 button appeared on the SERP view. It allows to draw the history of the first 10 websites in 1 click. Remember that you can also zoom in on the SERP chart as shown in the screencast below.

Homepage improved

The homepage now display the status of the last 5 tasks. This allows to know very quickly if the last task was successful. It is possible to access the logs or cancel the running task in one click from the homepage. The progress bar is dynamic, it is no more required to refresh the page to update it.

Serposcope may use a lot of disk space, that's why the database size and the remaining disk space are now displayed on the homepage.

New scoring

The computation of the score has been completely changed. The score of a website is now evaluated with a score between 1 and 100, regardless of the number of keywords. This allows a much better monitoring of the evolution of the website and permits to be aware of the health status of the website in a wink. The detail of the score calculation is explained in the FAQ.

The history of the scores were reset to 0 for all websites. If you want to recompute the history of the scores, you must delete the website and add it again (SERPs will be automatically re-scanned to recalculate scores and rankings).

Captchas

You can set up multiple accounts simultaneously (deathbycaptcha, anticaptcha ...). When a service is overloaded (which is often the case), serposcope will automatically switch to another provider. This should greatly reduce the failed tasks due to the unavailability/overloading of these services. We recommend you configure at least two different providers.

Websites management

• Adding a keyword to a group is now 20 times faster : this process could be slow when a group had a large history and thousands of keywords.
• Bulk import is available to add websites.
• Can rename a website.
• The UI has been enhanced with a few shortcuts to add events to calendar easier.
• Sorting of websites.
• The website view now displays the total number of keywords in the top3, top10... and their percentage.

Database

• Ability to perform backup and restore from the admin panel.
• Simplified Migration between MySQL and H2 via the new backup / recovery system (backups are compatible).
• Ability to limit the size of the database: The DB uses a lot of space if you track thousands of keywords. Since this version, the database keeps only the last 365 days. You can configure / disable this feature in the settings panel.
• Group view displays the total number of keywords stored in the database. A warning will be displayed when using the embedded DB H2 and tracking thousands of keywords (H2 is the default configuration, it is advisable to use MySQL if you plan to track many keywords).

New search settings

• The default number of scraped pages is now one page of 100 results instead of 5 pages of 10 results. The break has also been reduced from 10 seconds to 5. This will result to make searching 10 times faster. We didn't notice a big difference in the rankings when scraping 10 pages of 10 and 1 page of 100.
• Mobile Search uses a new type of smartphone user-agent. The positions will therefore change substantially for mobile search after this update.
• Finally, URLs present in the news section of the main SERP are no longer recorded.

Bugs fixed

Several bugs have been fixed, the most important concerning : Duplicate keywords on bulk import. A keyword detected as duplicate while it wasn't (MySQL only). Invalid break time when random sleep time was used. Check the full changelog for a complete list.