Getting Started

RankDebug is organised around workspaces, and a workspace is one website. Everything you connect, every crawl, every deploy and every alert belongs to that website. If you look after a second site, give it a second workspace, so its data and its team stay separate.

This page walks through the order that gets you useful answers soonest: add the website, connect Search Console, then add the other sources.

1. Add your website

Open the workspace switcher, enter a workspace name and the website address (for example https://yourbrand.com), and click Create Workspace. The website address is what the site check and the crawler visit, so use the address your visitors land on. You can change it later in the workspace settings, together with the name and the timezone. The timezone sets when your email digests go out.

As soon as the workspace has a website, RankDebug starts its daily site check: robots.txt, sitemaps, the homepage and how the site answers on its www and non-www, http and https addresses. That needs no connection at all.

2. Connect Search Console first

Go to Connections and click Connect Search Console. Google asks you to approve read-only access, and then you choose the property that matches your website. A domain property and a URL-prefix property both work.

Search Console comes first because most of RankDebug is measured in clicks from it. Opportunities, clicks at stake on every finding, the pages a site check visits beyond the homepage, the weekly crawl and the search impact of a deploy all depend on it. Until it is connected, the Overview page asks you to connect it.

The first pull reaches back about 16 months, which is as much history as Google keeps. It runs a week at a time, oldest first, and the connection card shows how many weeks are done while it runs. After that, RankDebug pulls once a day and pulls the last few days again each time, because Search Console data arrives two to three days late and is revised.

3. Add Google Analytics, Cloudflare and Bing

Each of these adds a different view of the same site:

• Google Analytics adds what search visitors did after they landed: sessions, key events and revenue per landing page, traffic by channel, and a check of whether the analytics data can be trusted. The first pull reaches back about 14 months, a month at a time.
• Cloudflare adds what reached your site at the edge: requests per crawler and status code, the paths that answered with errors, and the firewall rules that blocked or challenged a crawler. The first pull covers the last 7 days, and it then updates every hour.
• Bing Webmaster Tools adds Bing clicks and impressions, top queries and pages, and Bing's crawl statistics. It is pulled once a day.

If you deploy from GitHub or GitLab, you can also connect the repository so deploys are recorded on their own. See Deploys for that and for the CI webhook.

What appears when

• Right away: the first site check runs on its daily schedule once the workspace has a website, or when you click Check Site Now on the Deploys page.
• During the backfill: the Overview fills in from the oldest week forward, with a "Data through" date that tells you how fresh the numbers are.
• After a Search Console pull: opportunities are scored once a day from the pulled history.
• Once a week: a full site crawl runs for every workspace with an active Search Console connection. You can also start one yourself from the Crawl page.
• After a deploy: a site check a couple of minutes later and a crawl a few minutes later, when the deploy is to production.

Disconnecting a source stops new pulls. The data already pulled stays in the workspace.

Where to go next