#11971 – 4SEO Analysis and Sitemap Issues in Local Setup

Hi

What am I missing in the configuration?

Well, what "local setup" are you using, exactly?

4SEO does not really care about where your site is hosted, as long as the Website home address is the current one (ie localhost, something.dev,...).

When I click "Analyse", the number of pending pages increases until it reaches a limit, then it gradually drops back to zero.

Exactly as expected, that's the normal analysis process when you trigger it manually with Analyze Now.

However, both the "analysed" and "errors" sections remain at zero the entire time.

This means that 4SEO analyzed your home page, found links, analyzed these pages and found that they don't pass the rules you set to be included. For instance, they have noindex robots tags, or are excluded by robots.txt, etc

When I click the sitemap link, although it says there are 359 images, the XML shows everything as zero

What does "everything as zero" means? exactly? where do you see zeros?

and no XML file is created in the specified path

There will never be any actual file created. 4SEO does not create an .xml file for the sitemap.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

in this case, it's https://nombre.empresa.local/, which is what we've configured as the site's main address.

Is that a real HTTPS certificate? or self-signed? If self-signed, and you did not disable certificate check in 4SEO site analysis settings, then the PHP crawler will refuse to connect.

Does that mean it's normal for no pages to be analysed?

Absolutely all pages are analyzed (unless you used a self-signed certificate). But the result of the analysis is that no page is kept as valid in the pages list. That's why the sitemap lists no page. You will have pages listed in the sitemap when you have pages on the Pages page in 4SEO. The sitemap is essentially a copy of what's in the Pages page.

So they were all analyzed. And likelyrejected. Which is why I wrote:

This means that 4SEO analyzed your home page, found links, analyzed these pages and found that they don't pass the rules you set to be included. For instance, they have noindex robots tags, or are excluded by robots.txt, etc

Is that that case?

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

The certificate is self-signed, but I’ve ticked the option shown in the screenshot I’ve attached.

That's still a red flag. Have you checked logs in the Joomla log folders (you can use our 4Logs small plugin for that)? There may be some information there. 

Another issue I see sometimes with custom setup like yours is DNS. I'm not sure how you set up DNS to use that domain locally but the analysis process is done by your own website (ie PHP) making HTTP requests to your site. So if PHP cannot resolve that name, the requests will fail.

That's another posisble reason, but your local setup is likely to be the root cause here. It's of course normal to use 4SEO on a local setup, I personally only develop locally (on windows even!).

If I disable the 4SEO plugins, it works again.

Which absolutely never means 4SEO is actually causing the issue. 

What configuration should I change to prevent this from happening?

There's nothing in 4SEO itself that can cause anything like this. So what you have to look at is all the configuration you made on top of it:

- the Website home address of course

- disable all the "Always redirect to home address"

- disable all redirect rules (there's an option in the Settings button in the toolbar to disable all rules with one click)

- same for any other SEO rules and replamcent rules

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

I disabled the CDN and external cache options

When the "bypass CDN" option is enabled, 4SEO appends to all URLs a random query variable (ie ?_cdnbust=917d65da-483b-4afa-bbf2-6887b6922597) when fetching pages to be analyzed. This way, we get a fresh page from any caching or CDN mechanism that can be in place.

That's all it does. We can't tell - and don't even try - to know if you use a CDN or caching at server level. The only thing 4SEO cares about is to bypass any such mechanism so that when it fetches a page to analyze it, the page is rendered by joomla and we do not get a cached response - whether cached by a CDN or varnish on your server, or nginx fastcgi cache, or anything else.

Then when that request is rendered by Joomla, the first thing 4SEO does is remove that query variables from the request data. 

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Again: absolutely no idea. Your specific local setup is doing this. I don't know what it does, how apache/nginx or whatever you use is configured, what it passes back to PHP, hide from PHP, etc And even if I knew, I could not possibly give you good advice because the only thing 4SEO is in control of if inside of Joomla. The webserver environment is not something I can control, support or advise about.

If it works now, it's all good, but I can't tell you why it works now and did not work before because 4SEO is strictly not involved here.

What 4SEO needs is that when it makes a regular HTTP requests from your Joomla site to your Joomla site using Joomla HTTP PHP client, that request goes through your webserver and into Joomla, just like any visitor request. All requests headers have to be passed normally. If that happens, then everything works.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

how do you handle this kind of situation?

I don't. There never was any sort of issue with 4SEO or any other Joomla site. You run a local webserver, apache, mysql, php and that jsut works. There's nothing special about being local.

It looks like the pages aren’t recognised until you actually browse the site

Well, yes, that's normal and expected. Background processing in Joomla is triggered by frontend visitors. No visitors, no work can be done.

That's why there's a manual analysis. You should read the Getting started overview about pages.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr