This week Helen Grimbly, Support Lead at Sitemorse, will be summarising what addresses are included in assessments.

An assessment begins at the start page (often the front page of the site, but configurable), and follows the clickable links, spidering the site downwards, assessing contents page by page.

Anything that is on the same web server and under the same sub directory as the start page of the assessment is included in the test, anything else is treated as external. External links are tested to check they are not broken but the content they point to is not assessed.

On request, we can add inclusions to widen the scope of the assessment. We can also add exclusions to treat as external URLs that would otherwise be included in the assessment, or block URLs so they are not even checked to see if they are broken.

https://www.example.com/news/ 'start point' 
https://www.example.com/news/2018/ - assessed 
https://www.example.com/about/ - external (because not under original sub directory) 
http://www.example.com/news/ - external (because http site different server to https) 
https://blog.example.com/news/ - external (because blog is a different server name)