What is the OQL filter?
The Oncrawl Query Language (OQL) filter appears at the top of every dashboard as a Filter button next to the segmentation selection menu.
You can use an OQL expression, like the ones you see in the Data Explorer, to filter the URLs displayed in the graphs on a report.
What is the difference between the OQL filter and a segmentation?
Remove unwanted URLs from the visualization
Unlike a segmentation, which places URLs into buckets and displays each bucket on a graph, the OQL filter removes from the display any URLs that don't meet the filter criteria.
This means that you could, for example, use the OQL filter to only display URLs that are indexable, and also apply a segmentation based on the URL directory to see how indexable URLs are distributed across your site.
Immediately display the resulting URLs
The OQL filter is applied immediately. If you want to make a change, open the filter to modify it, directly from the dashboard page.
In contrast, if you want to make a change to a specific group in a segmentation, you need to go to the segmentation editor, make the change, and then return to your dashboard.
Is there a default OQL filter?
In fact, most of Oncrawl's dashboards already have a pre-established filter for indexable compliant pages. These are pages that don't send signals that they shouldn't be indexed, both explicit (such as a meta robots "noindex" tag) and implicit (such as responding with a 301 redirect or listing a different URL as the canonical URL).
You can change this by using a different filter.
What metrics can be used in an OQL filter?
You can use any any data point accessible in Oncrawl in an OQL filter: data from connected data sources, ingested data, data obtained through scraping rules, etc.
Why is there no data in my charts when I use an OQL filter?
It's possible to set up a filter that doesn't allow any URLs to be displayed. This can happen in one of two situations:
No URLs correspond to the filter criteria that you've chosen.
The filter you've built uses metrics that are not available in the dataset used by the dashboard you're currently viewing.
You can solve this by modifying your OQL filter.
Where to find the OQL filter
At the top of any dashboard, the Filter button is available next to the segmentation menu.
Click on the button to open the window where you can build an OQL.
When you click Apply to close the window, your filter is applied directly to the dashboard and all of the charts on the dashboard are updated.
When you switch to a different dashboard, the same filter will remain in place.