Change types & noise filtering
SiteAlert watches more than 20 different things on every page, and then filters hard so you only hear about the changes that actually matter. This page explains both: what we track, and how we keep the noise out.
What we track
Every day we compare each page to its previous version and look for changes across all of these:
- Title — the page title that shows in search results and browser tabs
- Meta description — the snippet under your title in Google
- Headings — your
H1and other headings - Canonical tag — which URL a page says is the "real" one
- Robots directives — whether a page tells search engines to index it or not
- Hreflang — your language and region targeting
- Structured data (JSON-LD) — the rich-result markup Google reads
- Links — internal and outbound links on the page
- Images — including missing or changed images
- HTTP status — whether a page returns OK, an error, or a redirect
- Redirects — where a URL now points
- Body text — the visible content itself
If a page suddenly returns a 404, loses its canonical tag, gets set to "no-index", or has its title rewritten, we catch it.
How severity works
Not all changes are equal, so each one gets a severity:
| Severity | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Something that can hurt your SEO right now, a page gone to 404, a "no-index" added by accident, a lost canonical. |
| High | An important change worth a look soon, like a rewritten title on a key page. |
| Medium | A real change, but lower stakes. |
| Low / Info | Minor edits, logged for the record. |
By default, the higher severities become notifications; the rest stay in your timeline. You can tune where that line sits per page group in your site settings.
How we keep the noise out
Websites change in tiny, meaningless ways all the time. If we alerted on every one, you'd tune us out. So changes pass through four layers of filtering before they ever reach you:
Address clean-up
We strip out tracking bits from URLs (like campaign tags) so the same page isn't mistaken for a new one.
Ignored elements
Parts you've marked as noisy, cookie banners, live prices, view counters, are skipped. See Pages & site settings.
Self-learning filter
SiteAlert notices which bits of a page flicker on their own and quietly learns to ignore them, without you lifting a finger.
Template grouping
When one change hits hundreds of pages at once (a CMS-wide footer edit, say), we collapse it into a single alert instead of burying you.
Still seeing something you don't care about? Open the change and mark it as noise. That feedback teaches SiteAlert to leave it alone next time.