Why isn’t my post showing in the dashboard?
These are the two main reasons that would lead to a post not appearing in the dashboard.
1. Parse.ly tracker is not installed on page
Data is collected only for pages and URLs that have a Parse.ly tracker installed, as described in the tracking code setup tech doc. You can check whether a page has the tracker installed via the Parse.ly validator or by using Google Chrome’s developer tools to verify pageviews.
2. Parse.ly metadata is not detected by crawler
If the page/URL in question has a Parse.ly tracker and is sending data to our servers, the Parse.ly crawler automatically visits the page from our servers to understand the page’s text and metadata content. Sometimes, the crawler will fail to detect valid metadata, or the crawler will be blocked from crawling the page. For information on how the crawler detects metadata, you can look at our “Providing metadata” tech doc. You can also use the Parse.ly validator to check for metadata on pages. If you suspect the crawler is being blocked, take a look at our “Crawler information” page to perhaps have your web/tech team unblock it.
Parse.ly does support collecting traffic for pages that do not have metadata, or for which the Parse.ly crawler is blocked. In this case, the URL in question will show up as a “page” in the dashboard, rather than a “post”. In our terminology, a “post” is a “page with valid metadata”, such as a title, publication date, author/creator name, and/or any number of content grouping tags, whereas a “page” is a “raw URL with traffic”, where the only thing we know about the page is its host and path.
To find “pages”, you can use the Page Type filter at the top of every listing screen in the dashboard. Selecting “All Pages” or “Non-post Pages” will reveal pages not classified as posts, like homepages, index pages, product pages, and pages that are missing metadata.
3. There is some other issue with the page in question
There could be other issues with the page in question if you are convinced the tracker is installed and page metadata is being crawled. For example:
- Some sites have third-party JavaScript code errors that prevent the Parse.ly tracker code from running correctly. If you suspect this is the issue, you’ll need to reach out to our support team to investigate, at support@parsely.com.
- The canonical URL of the page might be configured in a way you don’t expect, and as a result, it might be showing up as a “link alias” for a “Multi-page article” elsewhere in your dashboard. Usually, sorting this out requires help from our Support team at support@parsely.com.
- If all else fails, one of our Support Engineers can run some additional debugging steps to figure out what’s going on.
Last updated: December 06, 2022