What is overwrite protection on a change?

A change can wait for approval for a while. Meanwhile someone may edit the same page on your website. Overwrite protection makes sure publishing never replaces that edit without anyone seeing it.

How it works

1. When a change is prepared, from any tool (Issues, SEOPilot, the fix jar, internal links, Page optimisation, Plan & changes), SEOmise reads the values the change will replace through your site connector. It keeps only a fingerprint of each value, never a second copy.
2. When the change is published, your connector compares the page with those fingerprints just before it writes.
3. If the page changed, nothing is written. The change says Not published: the page changed on the site.
4. Press Prepare again: the same change is prepared from the page as it is now, with a new preview. It waits for approval again, so a person looks at the new situation.

Each change in Act → Changes shows its protection:

• Overwrite protection on: the connector checks the page when it publishes.
• Overwrite protection on for some items: very large changes, or pages the connector did not report, are partly protected; the change says how many items.
• Update your connector for overwrite protection: your connector is too old to check. The change is published exactly as before; the version you need is shown.
• Overwrite protection off: there is no connector, the site did not answer when the change was prepared (press Refresh preview to read again), or the tool that prepared it publishes without the check on purpose and says why.

Which connectors check

The WordPress plugin, the Laravel package and the PHP connector, from the versions shown on the change. Hosted platforms (Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and others) have no connector, so changes are made by hand.

Changes you make by hand

SEOmise cannot stop a change you make yourself, so it checks afterwards. For page titles, descriptions and canonical addresses it notes the value the change replaces. When a scan made before you applied it, or your live page, shows something else than both that value and the new one, the steps screen warns The page changed since you planned this: check that nothing someone else changed was lost. The warning can also show before you start, when a newer scan already saw a different value.