Feature Announcements

Explore request snapshots of your pages

  • October 4, 2019
  • Veronika Martosova

Here's a feature for the power users! Have you ever wondered what the exact response was that we received when crawling your page? ContentKing now lets you see the request we made and the response we received every time we crawled any of your pages. More specifically, you can see:

  • the requested URL, request method, and status code, and the remote IP address of the server that returned the response
  • the headers of the HTTP request that we sent
  • the headers of the HTTP response that we received
  • the full response payload (available on our Enterprise plans)
ContentKing’s snapshot of request and response headers

A very common use case for this feature is when you see two alternating versions of a page, and you want to identify where the unwanted version comes from in your infrastructure and get rid of it quickly before search engines can spot it.

Two alternating versions of a page title in Tracked Changes in ContentKing

Getting to the root of this kind of unwanted alternation can be tricky. Here are some common causes that we’ve come upon over the years:

  • Your CDN provider may be experiencing issues.
  • If your page is stored on multiple web servers, each of them may be sending different responses to the same request.
  • If you have caching in place in your infrastructure, it may be that a cached version is being returned instead of the up-to-date version.
  • Different responses may also be produced by pre-rendering.

If you can't make sense of what's going on, then consult with your technical team about the differing request snapshots.

How to see a request snapshot

Getting to the snapshot of a request we’ve made is easy:

  1. Open the Tracked Changes of the page for which you want to see a request snapshot.
  2. Go through the different versions of the page and click the View snapshot link that is displayed on hover for the version you’re interested in.
ContentKing's Meta description Issue header

Get started now

Request snapshots are available on your account right now, so don’t wait—check them out!

Not using ContentKing yet? Do your website a favour and start your free trial today.

Veronika Martosova

Veronika is ContentKing's Product Manager. She loves talking to our customers to understand their needs and then work with the development team to come up with the right solutions to them. She enjoys working on the intersection of design, development, marketing and business.