The Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to quickly analyse, audit and review a site from an onsite SEO perspective. It’s particulary good for analysing medium to large sites where manually checking every page would be extremely labour intensive (or impossible!) and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue.
The spider allows you to export key onsite
SEO elements (url, page title, meta description, headings etc) to Excel
so it can easily be used as a base to make SEO recommendations from. Our
video below provides a demonstration of what the tool can do -
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool Reports On The Following
A quick summary of some of the data collected -- Errors – Client & server errors (No responses, 4XX, 5XX)
- Redirects – (3XX, permanent or temporary)
- External Links – All followed links and their subsequent status codes
- URI Issues – Non ASCII characters, underscores, uppercase characters, dynamic uris, long over 115 characters
- Duplicate Pages – Hash value / MD5checksums lookup for pages with duplicate content
- Page Title – Missing, duplicate, over 65 characters, short, pixel width truncation, same as h1, or multiple
- Meta Description – Missing, duplicate, over 156 characters, short, pixel width truncation or multiple
- Meta Keywords – Mainly for reference as it’s only (barely) used by Yahoo.
- H1 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple
- H2 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple
- Meta Robots – Index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir etc
- Meta Refresh – Including target page and time delay
- Canonical link element & canonical HTTP headers
- X-Robots-Tag
- rel=“next” and rel=“prev”
- File Size
- Page Depth Level
- Inlinks – All pages linking to a URI
- Outlinks – All pages a URI links out to
- Anchor Text – All link text. Alt text from images with links
- Follow & Nofollow – At link level (true/false)
- Images – All URIs with the image link & all images from a given page. Images over 100kb, missing alt text, alt text over 100 characters
- User-Agent Switcher – Crawl as Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoo! Slurp, mobile user-agents or your own custom UA.
- Redirect Chains – Discover redirect chains and loops.
- Custom Source Code Search – The spider allows you to find anything you want in the source code of a website! Whether that’s analytics code, specific text, or code etc. (Please note – This is not a data extraction or scraping feature yet.)
- XML Sitemap Generator – You can create a basic XML sitemap using the SEO spider.