Site scanning: why it matters and what it gives

Why it matters

The service adds internal links to new articles — but it can only link to what it knows about. Before scanning it only knew the articles it wrote itself. If you arrived with an existing blog, there was nothing to link to.

The Scan the site button on the Link index tab fixes this: the service collects pages that already exist on your site and adds them to the index.

How to run it

1. Open the site and go to the Link index tab.
2. Press Scan the site.
3. Scanning runs in the background for up to a minute. When it finishes you will see how many pages were added.

Where the pages come from

• WordPress — the list of posts and pages via the site's built-in API. The most accurate route: titles and publication dates arrive right away.
• Any other platform — URLs from the sitemap declared in robots.txt. Titles are fetched from the pages themselves.

Up to two hundred pages are added per run. A repeat scan only adds what is new and leaves known pages alone.

What scanning does not do

• It does not change your site: we only read public pages.
• It does not overwrite articles published through the service — their titles and keywords are more accurate.
• It does not stress the site: concurrency is limited and pages are read partially.

Relation to topic research

The same page list is used when suggesting topics: the service does not propose what you have already written. So it is worth scanning before your first topic run.

Check the sitemap separately

Scanning starts from the sitemap, and if it is incomplete both internal linking and topic research suffer. You can see what is in it for free: sitemap analyzer.