Unless you want to look at each URL individually, you'll need to group similar pages together to make it possible to analyze their role in your website. (But don't let us stop you if you really do want to look at each URL: head over to the URL details section of the crawl results.)
What is segmentation and why do you need it?
Segmentation is a way of gathering pages into segments, or page groups, based on some characteristic. When you look at the crawl results using segmentation, you see trends and behaviors of that characteristic.
Imagine you had a group of people instead of a group of URLs.
To understand how height is distributed, you might want to group people by age: this might show you that ten-year-olds are, on average, shorter than 20-year-olds, and you might realize that the 6-foot ten-year-old is really a 19-year-old who hit the wrong key when entering her age.
Or you might group people by gender, in order to see whether or not there's a meaningful difference between men's and women's heights.
Similarly, if you only want to look at the height of people who play professional basketball, you'll need to have grouped people by professions in order to focus on that specific profession.
Segmentation can help you answer questions like:
Segmentation by type of pages:What types of pages on my site have the most errors?
Segmentation by content category:What content categories perform best?
Segmentation by seasonality:Are there recurring problems on my seasonal product pages?
Segmentation by product category:Is there a difference in how my product categories are crawled?
What is OnCrawl's default segmentation⏤and why?
OnCrawl provides a basic segmentation by default. Because we don't know anything about your site or the type of questions you need to ask about it, we've picked a segmentation that can apply to all sites to give you a very basic overview of your data.
OnCrawl's default segmentation looks at the first directory in the URL path.
It creates a group for each directory it finds in that position. Everything with no first directory is placed in the category "Other."
We chose this segmentation based on URLs patterns because it is one of the only types of information available whether you look at crawl results, or at analyses from Google Analytics, from the server logs, or from any third-party datasets uploaded to OnCrawl.
This means that the default segmentation, like any other segmentation based on the URL, can be used with all of your reports (Crawl Reports, Logs Monitoring, SEO Impact Reports, Ranking Reports…).
What is the "Other" category?
Any URLs that don't fit into the different groups in a segmentation are placed in the category "Other".
As we saw above, this might be pages that don't have the property that is used to create the segmentation. For example, if we use the first directory in the URL path to segment the data, a page like https://www.mysite.com/welcome.html doesn't have a first directory. It will be categorized as "Other".
What are custom segmentations?
We encourage you to create your own segmentation. You can do this before you crawl your site, after you crawl your site, while you're crawling your site...
You can modify the default segmentation or create a new segmentation for your site.
Set up and modify your segmentations from the Segmentation page:
From the project home page, scroll down to the "Analysis" section and click on the "Configure Segmentation" button
or
When looking at any analysis, click on the "Configure Segmentation" button at the top right of the page.
You can create a segmentation based on any information available in OnCrawl, whether it comes from a crawl or from another source.
This includes every single one of the OnCrawl metrics, such as:
Word count
Inlinks range
Page depth
URL structure
This also includes data from any third-party source.
Here are just a few examples of information that isn't included in OnCrawl by default:
Google Analytics: SEO Sessions
Server logs: Googlebot hits
Google Search Console: Page positions
Majestic: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Number of backlinks
Data Scraping: Google Tags, Article publication dates, Sold-out product pages
Data Ingestion: Seasonal pages, Business KPIs
Note: If you're looking at a report that doesn't include the data used to segment your URLs, that segmentation won't be available. It'll show up again when you switch to a report that uses the pertinent information, though.
How to change segmentations when viewing analysis results
When viewing any analysis results, you can change the segmentation used to display the data in the charts.
At the top of the page, use the "Segmentation" drop-down menu to select one of the available segmentations.
You can also focus on one of the page groups in the active segmentation by changing the group selected in the second drop-down menu, "Base filter".
Segmentation best practices
Set multiple segmentations and don't hesitate to switch between them when looking at data.
Create pages groups inside of a main group. This multi-level segmentation allows to drill down into the details of a category.
Limit the number of URLs in the "Other" category. These are URLs that don't correspond to the grouping rules for any of the other categories in your segmentation.
You can download a segmentation from one project and upload it to another.
If you want to use a custom or third-party metric in a segmentation, run the crawl first so that OnCrawl knows that the metric exists. Then create the segmentation.
Orphan pages will not show up in your segmentation for crawl data only. This is normal: pages that are not linked do not show up in crawl results. Use a cross-data analysis to include orphan pages in your page groups.
Going further
You may want to look at:
Or, if you still have questions, drop us a line at @oncrawl_cs or click on the Intercom button at the bottom right of your screen to start a chat with us.
Happy crawling!
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segmentación y grupos de páginas
segmentation et groupes de pages