Content checks & smart rules

Content checks fetch a page on a schedule and test it against a rule you set, such as a phrase that must be present, a tag that must be installed or a file that must not be public. When a rule starts failing, TLDTrack alerts you.

Rules built from check types

You do not need any technical knowledge to set up a content check. You pick a check type and fill in its settings, or start from a ready-made standard check. Rules generally fall into three shapes:

• Specific text appearing, for example a keyword rule that fails if the words 'out of stock' are found.
• Specific text disappearing, for example a guarantee or a piece of required legal wording that must be present.
• Something technical going missing, for example the Google Tag Manager tag, a meta description, a security header, or the page becoming blocked from search engines.

Good things to watch

Content checks are ideal for the details that matter commercially or legally. The best rules watch things where a failure would actually cost you something:

• A product's stock or availability status, so you hear when "out of stock" appears on the page.
• The Google Tag Manager tag or a meta description, which redesigns often drop.
• Your robots.txt. The SEO: robots.txt problems template reads the file itself, lists every path it blocks for each crawler, and alerts when it goes missing or cannot be read, blocks the whole site or the homepage, or gains a block that was not there at the last check.
• Contact details, such as a phone number set as a keyword that must be present, so you hear if it is removed or changed.
• A clause in your terms or a required piece of legal wording that must not vanish.

A simple test: if it would matter that it went missing or appeared, it is worth a rule.

What you can configure

Beyond the rule itself, a content check has two settings worth knowing about:

• Which pages it watches. A rule can watch a single page on one site, the same path across several of your sites, or that path across every site you manage. That last option is what makes content checks useful at agency scale: one rule such as "the homepage must have Google Tag Manager installed" can cover a whole portfolio.
• How often it runs. Each rule has its own cadence, from hourly through every 6 hours, every 12 hours, daily or weekly. Daily is the default and suits most rules; reach for hourly when a failure would be genuinely urgent, such as a stock label on a busy shop.

What you need before you start

• A website added to TLDTrack to attach the rule to (see Add your first website).
• The content-checks module switched on. It is on by default. If you have turned it off in Settings, content rules stop running and their alerts are hidden until you turn it back on.
• A clear idea of what a failure looks like. Knowing the exact phrase, header or file you care about makes for a tighter rule and cleaner alerts.

Setting one up, step by step

1. 1
   Open the website from your Domains list. If you have not added it yet, see Add your first website.
2. 2
   On the site's Content Checks tab, press Add a watch, then Standard check. Pick a ready-made check, or choose Build a custom check to pick the check type yourself. You can also use New rule on the Content monitoring page.
3. 3
   Choose which pages it applies to. A standard check can be added to several sites at once, and to sites you add later. A rule's edit form lets you choose one site, several sites or all of them.
4. 4
   Pick how often it should run, from hourly to weekly, in the rule's edit form. Daily is the default.
5. 5
   Save. TLDTrack checks the page on your chosen schedule and alerts you when the rule starts failing. To check it straight away, open the rule and use Run now, or Run check now on the site's Content Checks tab.

What you will see, and what to do

Once a rule is saved, TLDTrack checks the page on its schedule and stays quiet while the rule passes. When it starts failing, you get one alert that names the rule and the pages it failed on, so you can go straight to the page and look. You are not alerted again while it stays failing. Some checks only show a warning on the rule and never send an alert, such as a low word count, a stale copyright year or fewer than five broken images. A rule run with Run now updates its status without sending an alert. From there you decide what to do: fix the page, follow up with whoever changed it, or adjust the rule. For how these alerts reach you and who is told, see alerts and notifications.

Where to set this up

Good to know

• Content checks test the page's HTML as it is served, without running JavaScript. To watch one specific element, like a single price or a stock label, and be told when that exact thing changes, see visual monitoring.
• To watch the technical side of a page instead, such as analytics tags or JavaScript errors, see tracking and errors.
• A single rule can cover one page, several sites or your whole portfolio, so agencies can watch a rule across every client at once.
• Turning off the content-checks module in Settings stops these rules and hides their alerts for the whole team, which is different from deleting a single rule.