The 'robots.txt' file is intended to prevent automated web agents from accessing certain parts of a web site. For example a compliant search engine spider will prevent itself from indexing any areas of your site listed as denied in your robots file.

Sitemorse is designed to experience a web site as the user does. Users do not consult the robots file when browsing, and nor are they made aware of its content. Were Sitemorse to ignore pages or directories listed in the robots file problems with the page code which potentially affect your users would go unnoticed.

Additionally because Sitemorse reports are only made available to you the tests do not "leak" any information to external users.

Sitemorse provides an independent detailed assessment of the technical features of your website. It features an overall view including main problems, a detailed view including the specific line numbers of faulty code and a historical view with access to all past reports in order to identify trends or anomalies. The majority of readings are also benchmarked according to widely accepted standards, e.g. 14 seconds is the maximum acceptable home page download time for users with a 56k modem dial-up connection. You may select the number of web pages to be tested during a scan from a range of sizes, starting with a single web page, up to the number of testing credits that you have purchased. 1,5 or 10 page scans are run immediately whereas larger tests are queued and may take a matter of hours before the scan is run.

As our reports are web based, your results are available regardless of your type of computer, operating system, browser or internet connection. JavaScript is not required.

At the time of requesting a new test users can select the maximum number of pages to scan. If you have a small site, or just want to scan the first few pages pick 50. At the other end of the scale Sitemorse can scan 50,000 pages. Our default is 250 pages. If your site’s page count is greater than our maximum then please contact us.

Sites often split content up via sub domains. For example 'sales.example.com' or 'support.example.com' move two departments to their own, isolated, area of the site.

A Sitemorse test of the main site (in this case 'www.example.com') considers the two sub domains as external sites, and does not follow these links.

This has several advantages, domains split by department are often maintained by a different web team, working to another schedule. The site tests can be configured independently of one another, reporting direct to the relevant personnel.

However, such divisions can be made purely for convenience. Perhaps to host a number of pages on a different web server. In this case Sitemorse can be configured to include the sub domain - contact sales for further details.

Sitemorse tests begin horizontally (scanning along the various main pages) and then vertically (taking each of the sub pages in turn).

For Sitemorse surveys only pages available without login are audited, Sitemorse clients may supply login information for a variety of authentication methods.

Sitemorse audits make only one connection request at a time. This shouldn't be enough to make any noticeable impact on the server load.

Additionally, "normal" user browsers also make multiple requests simultaneously - fetching images, style sheets and other files to render the page.

Sitemorse monitoring makes up to five simultaneous connections at a time. The equivalent of a couple of users browsing your site.

Sitemorse clients can supply authentication details for Sitemorse to log into externally accessible Intranets or staff only sites.

We can also provide the IP addresses of our testing servers if you wish to audit an internal resource.

No - Sitemorse only looks at the page sent to the user's browser, not how it is created. All pages should however work without the need to install or use Flash and other other tools which can be troublesome to some users.

No - Sitemorse accesses your site in the same way that a user's browser does. No matter what technologies your site uses on the back end, the public interface always uses standard systems such as HTTP and HTML, and it is through these standard systems that Sitemorse is testing your site.

To ensure the best response to each user many of our customers spread the load of their site over multiple web servers. Should one of these web servers fail, or serve content that is different from the others, some users may receive an old page or perhaps none at all. Problems like this can be hard to diagnose from the inside. By providing a direct link to each server (ie www1.example.org and www2.example.org) Sitemorse tests their content and performance individually, especially important if your servers are located on different networks.

To your web server Sitemorse tests look like any other traffic. Consequently any web statistic software you have running will include our visits like any other.

If you wish to exclude Sitemorse from such figures simply filter requests where the User-Agent contains the characters "b2w ".

If your software does not support this an alternative method is to exclude our IP addresses, currently: '89.234.59.74' and '89.234.59.75'. Please note IP addresses are liable to change in the future without warning.

Sitemorse engages your web server using HTTP protocols and the returned files and/or error codes are examined individually.

Even if parts of a site are marked as an archive if the content is online it should be correct. "Out of date" links which have expired since publication should be removed. If you have chosen to provide historical information to your users then it should be accessible to all of them.