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Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A Top Web Crawler

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Web Crawler
Analysing web spidering by Web Crawler

Introduction to Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

For a website’s search engine ranking, Many factors including keywords and backlinks etc plays a crucial role. And, a web site structure can also makes a web crawler(such as search engine bots) crawls a website very easily & is also very essential for a website’s search engine ranking. As like any other crawler, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is industry-leading website crawler. Screaming Frog Web Crawler is available for Windows OS, macOS, and Ubuntu.

As we all know, Web Spidering (aka Web Indexing) allows any web site to show up in SERP results. To make that happen, bots must be able to effectively crawl your web site. Looking for an unindexed web site is almost next to impossible (unless an indexing glitch has taken place, and it would create the web site practically nonexistent because it can’t be found else where on the world wide web.

Screaming Frog Web Crawler is trusted by a large number of SEOs and agencies worldwide for technical SEO audits. This SEO Spider enables you to export key onsite SEO components (URL, page title, meta explanation, headings etc) to Excel so that it can easily be utilized as a base for SEO recommendations.

What Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawler is?

As like other website crawlers, Screaming Frog crawl any valid website. But this SEO spider tool takes crawling a website up by a notch by giving you relevant on-site data and creating digestible statistics and reports. With insightful website data from this Screaming Frog crawler, you can easily identify areas your web site must work on.

Why should i use only Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawler?

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawler crawls sites like Googlebot & by discovering hyperlinks in the HTML utilizing a breadth-first algorithm. It runs on the configurable hybrid storage space engine. It is able to conserve data in RAM and disk to crawl huge websites. By default, it will only crawl the natural HTML of a website. Nonetheless, it can also render webpages using headless Chromium to find content and links of the website.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawler enables you to quickly crawl, analyze and audit a website onsite SEO. It can be utilized to crawl both little and very huge websites, where manually examining every page. Also, it will be incredibly labor intensive (or difficult!) and where you can certainly miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate web page issue.

What are the different modes of the SEO Frog crawler tool?

SEO Frog Crawling tool has 2 different modes. They are listed below.

  1. Database storage mode
  2. RAM storage mode

How to set up your device’s memory & storage settings in Screaming Frog?

By default, Website crawl settings is applicable to all websites including big as well as small websites. But, usually crawling bigger websites consumes more memory & processing power. With Screaming Frog application, it is possible to allot a certain amount of one’s device’s memory for crawling web sites. For the same purpose, this tool has database as well as RAM storage modes.

Screaming Frog’s database storage mode is fantastic tool for users with solid-state drives (aka SSDs). To utilize the database storage mode setting , please follow the below steps:

1. Please click on the Configuration menu of the crawler tool.
2. Select the System option, & then click Storage.
3. Further, Please Select the Database Storage Mode option.

Meanwhile, users who don’t have SSDs may settle for the RAM storage mode. For 32 bit computers, The default setting is 1GB RAM. Similarly, for 64 bit devices, the default setting is 2GB RAM. You know, Selecting A lower RAM prevents freezing and crashes while crawling with Screaming Frog.

But, if you wanna allocate more RAM for crawls, you can change the default RAM setting to a higher number. After applying the settings, It is mandatory to restart Screaming Frog.

Does SEO’s really need to use Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the Swiss Army Knife for SEO needs. From uncovering serious specialized SEO complications to crawling best landing web pages after a migration to uncovering JavaScript rendering complications to troubleshooting worldwide SEO problems. Screaming Frog is becoming an invaluable reference in most SEO’s arsenal. I recommend Screaming Frog for just about any person involved with SEO activities.

Screaming Frog Web Crawler is among the essential tools when an SEO turns to when executing a niche site audit. It will save time when an SEO wishes to analyze the framework of a niche site or come up with an article’s inventory for a niche site. An SEO can catch estimate the effective a niche site towards conference the informational or circumstance needs of the viewers of this site.

What tasks can Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawler performs?

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawler perform the following tasks for your SEO Needs:

  1. Broken link searches
  2. Temporary as well as permanent redirect searches
  3. Metadata analysis
  4. Duplicate content searches
  5. Reviews robots.txt along with other directives
  6. XML site map creation
  7. Website architecture analysis

Apart from above tasks, you can do a lot more other tasks with Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawler.

How to install Screaming Frog in Windows Operating System?

Hera are the steps to install screaming frog in Windows OS.

1. Go to Screaming Frog website & download it to your favorite folder in your PC/Laptop
2. Go to the folder of Screaming Frog installer in your PC/Computer.
3. Do Double click on the installer.
4. Click “Yes” on the User Account Control screen to continue installing Screaming Frog desktop application..
5. Further, Choose your installation type, then click the “Install” button.
6. Once the Screaming Frog finishes installing the software, click “Close”.

How to install Screaming Frog in MAC Operating System ?

Here are the steps to install Screaming Frog Crawler in MAC Operating System.

1. Go to Screaming Frog website & download it as per your OS.
2. Go to the folder of Screaming Frog installer of your OS.
3. Do Double click on the Screaming Frog installer.
4. A new window with the Screaming Frog software’s icon & Applications folder appears on your screen.
5. Do Click the Screaming Frog icon & drag it to the Applications folder.
6. Now, Close the window.
7. And, Go to Finder and look for the “ScreamingFrogSEOSpider” name in the Devices list.
8. Click the eject icon next to the installer name to finish the installation.

How to install Screaming Frog in Linux Operating System ?

Installation of Screaming Frog Application can be done using either Ubuntu User Interface (or) command line function on your computer.

a) Via Ubuntu User Interface.

1. Go to Ubuntu User Interface.
2. Do Double-click on the software’s .deb file.
3. Then, Choose “Install” & enter your password.
4. Now, Accept the ttf-mscorefonts-install license before you proceed installing Screaming Frog Application.
5. Wait until your computer finishes installing the Screaming Frog software.

b) Via Command Line Interface

1. Type the below command in an open terminal window

sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/screamingfrogseospider_17.0_all.deb

2. Now, Enter your password.
3. Also, Type “Y” to continue installing the Screaming Frog software & accept the ttf-mscorefonts-install End User License Agreement (EULA).

What is main limitation of Free Version of Screaming Frog ?

Please do keep in mind that when you install a free version of Screaming Frog application, It likely to crawl a maximum of 500 URLs of any website you provided. To crawl more websites, you may need a licensed version of Screaming Frog crawler. To buy the licensed version of the software, please go to Screaming Frog website.

Where to enter license key in Screaming Frog Application?

To enter license key of Screaming Frog’s premium version of software, please follow the below steps.

1. Open Screaming Frog Application.
2. Go to the License menu.
3. Click on the “Enter License” option.
4. Now, type in your license key of Screaming Frog Application.
5. Now, You should see a dialog box that shows the license’s validity & expiry date of Screaming frog.

What can you carry out with the SEO Spider?

The SEO Spider is a robust and flexible site crawler, in a position to crawl both small and incredibly large websites efficiently. It enabling you to analyze the results in real-time. It gathers crucial onsite data to permit SEOs to create informed decisions.

What are Other Limitations of Lite version of the SEO Spider Crawler?

The ‘lite’ version of the SEO Spider tool is free to download and use. Nevertheless, this version is fixed to crawl up to 500 URLs within a crawl cycle.

It generally does not provide you full usage of the configuration, conserving of crawls, JavaScript rendering, custom resource search or extraction, Google Analytics, hyperlink metrics integration and Search System. You can crawl 500 URLs from the same internet site, or as many websites as you prefer, as many times as you prefer, though!

What is the Price of the Screaming Frog Spider tool?

To gets rid of the 500 URL crawl limit, you can buy a license For just £149 per year. It enables you to conserve crawls, opens up the spider’s configuration choices and features.

What operating systems does Screaming Frog supports?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider can work on operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Linux.

How to create an XML sitemap using Screaming Frog?

Here are the steps to create XML Sitemap of a website using Screaming Frog.

1. Initially, Conduct a complete crawl of your web site along with its subdomains.
2. Do select the Advanced Export menu & then click on “XML Sitemap”.
3. This option helps to turn your website sitemap into an editable excel table.
4. Once you have opened the file, click on the “read online” option.
5. Then, click the “open as an SML table” option.
6. Now, You can edit your site map online, save it in the XML format, & can upload it to the Google.

How to performing content audits in Screaming Frog Tool?

Here are the steps to perform content audits using Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

1. Do Perform a full website crawl, & then go to the Internal tab.
2. Use the HTML filter to sort the word count column starting from low to high.
3. Now, Go to the Images tab.
4. On the Images tab, use the “missing alt text” filter to search for images without alt texts.
4. Go to the Page Titles tab, then filter for meta titles with over 70 characters. You may also locate duplicate meta titles on this tab.
5. Spot duplication issues with the duplicate filter in the URL tab. It can also applies to duplicate meta descriptions & duplicate pages with different titles in the meta description tab.
6. The URL tab will also let you pick pages with Non-Standard or unreadable URLs. You can also use it to fix the pages.
7. Last but not least, By using Directives tab, you may spot pages or links with directives.

What are Features of Screaming Frog SEO?

  1. To Find Broken Links

Crawl a website immediately and discover broken links (404s) and server errors. Mass export the mistakes and supply URLs to repair, or send out to a developer.

  1. Audit Redirects

Find temporary and long-lasting redirects, recognize redirect chains and loops, or upload a listing of URLs to audit in a niche site migration.

  1. Analyze Titles on Pages & Meta Data

Analyze titles on pages and meta descriptions throughout a crawl and identify the ones that are too long, brief, missing, or duplicated across your website.

  1. Discover Duplicate Content

Discover specific duplicate URLs with an md5 algorithmic check, partially duplicated components such as titles on pages, descriptions or headings and discover low content pages.

  1. Extract Data with XPath

Gather any data from the HTML of a website using CSS Route, XPath or regex. This may include sociable meta tags, extra headings, prices, SKUs or even more!

  1. Review Robots & Directives

Look at URLs blocked by robots.txt, meta robots or X-Robots-Tag directives such as for example ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’, along with canonicals and rel=“following” and rel=“prev”.

  1. Generate XML Sitemaps

Quickly create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps, with advanced configuration more than URLs to include, priority, last modified and change frequency.

  1. Integrate with Google Analytics

Hook up to the Google Analytics API and fetch consumer data, such as for example sessions or bounce price and conversions, goals, transactions and income for landing webpages against the crawl.

  1. Crawl JavaScript Websites

Render webpages using the integrated Chromium WRS to crawl dynamic, JavaScript rich websites and frameworks, such as for example Angular, Vue and React.js.

  1. Visualize Site Architecture

Evaluate inner linking and URL structure using interactive crawl and directory force-directed diagrams and tree graph site visualizations.

Advantages of using Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Here is a list of advantages using Screaming From Web Crawler.

  1. Helps to Find Broken Links, Mistakes & Redirects of website
    2. Analyze TITLES ON PAGES & Meta Data of website
    3. Review Meta Robots & Directives of websites
    4. Audit hreflang Attributes of websites
    5. Discover Duplicate Pages of websites
    6. Helps to Generate XML Sitemaps of website
    7. Site Visualizations
    8. Crawl Limit of websites
    9. Scheduling of audits
    10. Crawl Configuration may be done
    11. Save Crawls & Re-Upload the results
    12. Custom Source Code Search
    13. Custom Extraction
    14. Integration with Google Analytics
    15. Integration with Search Console
    16. Link Metrics Integration
    17. Rendering of JavaScript files
    18. Helps to create Custom robots.txt
    19. AMP Crawling & Validation of website
    20. Structured Data & Validation of website
    21. Store & View Natural & Rendered HTML of website
    Note: The maximum amount of URLs you can crawl would depend on allocated storage and storage.

The SEO Spider Tool Crawls & Reports On below topics of websites

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an SEO auditing tool, built by real SEOs with a large number of users worldwide. An instant summary of a few of the data gathered in a crawl may consist of below.

  1. Errors – Client mistakes such as for example broken links & server mistakes (No responses, 4XX, 5XX).
    2. Redirects – Permanent, short-term redirects (3XX responses) & JS redirects.
    3. Blocked URLs – Watch & audit URLs disallowed by the robots.txt process.
    4. Blocked Resources – Look at & audit blocked assets in rendering mode.
    5. External Links – All exterior links and their position codes.
    6. Protocol – If the URLs are protected (HTTPS) or insecure (HTTP).
    7. URI Problems – Non ASCII personas, underscores, uppercase people, parameters, or lengthy URLs.
    8. Duplicate Pages – Hash worth / MD5checksums algorithmic look for exact duplicate pages.
    9. TITLES ON PAGES – Missing, duplicate, over 65 characters, brief, pixel width truncation, identical to h1, or multiple.
    10. Meta Explanation – Missing, duplicate, over 156 characters, brief, pixel width truncation or multiple.
    11. Meta Keywords – Generally for reference, because they are not utilized by Google, Bing or Yahoo.
    12. QUALITY – Size of URLs & pictures of websites
    13. Response Time of website
    14. Last-Modified Header of website
    15. Page (Crawl) Depth.
    16. Word Count of Posts/pages of the website
    17. H1 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple.
    18. H2 – Lacking, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple.
    19. Meta Robots – Index, noindex, stick to, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir etc.
    20. Meta Refresh – Including a focus on-page and period delay.
    21. Canonical link component & canonical HTTP headers.
    22. X-Robots-Tag.
    23. Pagination – rel=“following” and rel=“prev”.
    24. Follow & Nofollow – At web page and link level (accurate/false).
    25. Redirect Chains – Discover redirect chains and loops.
    26. hreflang Features – Audit lacking confirmation links, inconsistent & incorrect languages non-canonical hreflang, codes and more.
    27. AJAX – Choose to obey Google’s today deprecated AJAX Crawling Scheme.
  2. Rendering – Crawl JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS and React, by crawling the rendered HTML after JavaScript provides executed.
    29. Inlinks – All web pages linking to a URI.
    30. Outlinks – All webpages a URI links out to.
    31. Anchor Text – All hyperlink text. An alt text message from pictures with links.
    32. Pictures – All URIs with the picture link & all pictures from the confirmed page. Images over 100kb, lacking alt text message, alt text over 100 characters.
    33. User-Agent Switcher – Crawl as Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoo! Slurp, mobile user-brokers or your own custom made UA.
    34. Custom HTTP Headers – Source any header worth in a demand, from Accept-Vocabulary to cookie.
    35. Custom Supply Code Search – Find whatever you want in the foundation code of an internet site! Whether that’s Google Analytics code, specific text message, or code, etc.
    36. Custom made Extraction – Scrape any data from the HTML of a URL using XPath, CSS Route selectors or regex.
    37. Google Analytics Integration – Hook up to the Google Analytics API and draw in consumer and conversion data straight during a crawl.
    38. Google Search Gaming console Integration – Hook up to the Google Search Analytics API and gather impressions, click and typical placement data against URLs.
    39. External Link Metrics – Draw external hyperlink metrics from Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz APIs right into a crawl to perform articles audits or profile links.
    40. XML Sitemap Era – Create an XML sitemap and a graphic sitemap using the SEO spider.
    41. Custom made robots.txt – Download, edit and check a site’s robots.txt using the brand new custom robots.txt.
    42. Rendered Screen Pictures – Fetch, watch and analyze the rendered web pages crawled.
    43. Store & Watch HTML & Rendered HTML – Needed for analyzing the DOM.
    44. AMP Crawling & Validation – Crawl AMP URLs and validate them, using the state integrated AMP Validator.
    45. XML Sitemap Evaluation – Crawl an XML Sitemap individually or component of a crawl, to discover missing, non-indexable and orphan webpages.
    46. Visualizations – Analyze the inner linking and URL framework of the using the crawl, site, and directory tree push-directed diagrams and tree graphs.
    47. Organized Data & Validation – Extract & validate organized data against Schema.org specifications and Google search features.

How to perform link audits in Screaming Frog Tool?

Here are the steps to perform Link Audits in Screaming Frog Software.

1. Open Spider configuration menu & check “Crawl all subdomains” option. Resources such as CSS, JavaScript, Images, Flash & any other unnecessary can be unchecked.
2. If you wish to crawl “nofollow links”, please do check the corresponding boxes accordingly.
3. Now, Start your crawl & wait for the task to finish it.
4. Further, Export crawl results to a CSV file by clicking the Advanced Report menu, & then the “All Links” option.

How to crawl a website in Screaming Frog Tool?

Here are the steps to crawl a website in Screaming Frog.

1. Open Screaming Frog Application
2. Click the Configuration menu & then select the Spider option from the menu.
3. Now, Check the “Crawl all subdomains” option in the configuration menu. If You wish to crawl media or scripts, you can also select any other available options.
4. Please start the crawling of the website & wait until it confirms that task has been completed successfully.
5. Once it finishes crawling the website, click on the Internal tab.
6. Finally, Filter your results by HTML & then do export the data as per your wish.

Why should i change Configuring settings of the crawler?

By Default, Screaming Frog already follows default settings for website crawls. But you can tweak these configuring settings and collect specific data using software’s numerous tools. By using these tools, your crawls will take up less time as well as processing power. You can customize your settings from the Configuration menu.

How to do customization of windows and columns in Screaming Frog?

In Screaming Frog, you can tweak the windows and columns according to your wish (or) for easier access. When you run the software, you will notice three windows. The right-side column enables you to access SEO elements and filters. On the other hand, you will notice a window directly below the main window that displays specific web page data.

Adjusting window sizes is an excellent way to customize your view in Screaming Frog. You can resize windows by dragging them to your desired size. Also, the program will let you customize columns as per your wish.

Clicking and dragging a column will move it to your desired position, while clicking the column will sort your website data. For instance, if you want to sort out your columns by number, you can do it by simply clicking on the column & the program will re-arrange the numbers from highest to lowest.

What are other Useful Features of Screaming Frog?

Here are some of the other features you might be interested to know.

Crawling support for staging sites

Along with live web sites, Screaming Frog also helps you to crawl staging sites. But you will have to enter your login credentials before you start it.

Compare & run multiple crawls

You can run Screaming Frog in multiple windows and also crawl multiple websites. Also, we can compare these crawls at the same time.

Crawling support for web forms

Along with crawling websites, Screaming Frog can also crawl web forms. To Access this feature, move over to Configuration > Authentication > Forms Based to start a form web crawl.

All Anchor Text option

This feature is under the Bulk Export menu. It includes all of your website’s anchor text in a CSV file. It can also shows you the text’s locations & links.

Crawl Analysis

The Crawl Analysis feature helps us to calculate the link scores. After every crawl of your web site, Other filters may also require calculation.

How Does it improve Search Rankings with its In-Depth SEO Audits?

As we all know, In-Depth SEO audits always help us to identify possible improvements of our website. Because of our continuous SEO efforts, our website can climb to the top of the search ladder & may surpass our competitors over a period of time. Further, you can also use these insightful data of your audit data to improve UX & other technical aspects of your website.

With this reliable partner on your side, you can get a closer look at your website’s performance to find out how you can improve it further. Thus, Screaming Frog will help you slowly make your way to the top of the search rankings.

How to do Crawling and diagnosing technical issues using Screaming Frog?

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop application that you may install on your PC, Mac or Linux machine. It spiders sites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a nice tool for crawling & diagnosing technical issues. A veteran SEO technician may have already used this tool. And it is a freemium model.

In free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider, You can crawl up to 500 URLs and can get limited features for free. Incase, you payed for the premium package, it will helps to crawl unlimited URLs of website and more advanced features.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a very good at diagnosing technical SEO issues:

Finds URL errors in real time

Google Search Console tends to take a bit of a lag for new website. If you have published a brand new website, it may take a day to three days of time for some of the SEO errors to be reported. Whereas with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you will be able to catch SEO errors a lot quicker. It gets a full list of crawlable URLs. That can be quite useful.

Reviews Key On-Page SEO elements

It reviews on-page SEO elements of the website.

When and why should I use this tool?

When you have a brand new website, it’s very good to have a first-time assessment of SEO of website. It helps you gauge how much content you’re dealing with, and how many webpages are you dealing with. Also, it is quite interesting to see how well-optimized title tags, meta descriptions are on the website.

Also, if you use this tool, You will not miss out of finding unoptimized title tags and descriptions and that other SEO points. And, in case, if you don’t use this tool, you might find that you’re losing a little bit of search engine trust. It is because you might have SEO errors that are being thrown up on the website.

What is a Web Crawler?

A Web crawler is an a bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web (WWW). It is typically operated by search engines. It is done for the purpose web spidering (aka Web indexing). Crawlers can validate hyperlinks and HTML code. They may be used for web scraping & data driven programming.

A web crawler is also known as a spider, an automatic indexer or a spider-bot or a crawler or a Web scutter (From the context of FOAF software).

What is the purpose of web spidering software?

Web crawling or web spidering software are used by Web search engines and websites. They uses web spidering software to update their web content or indices of other websites’ web content. Crawlers copy webpages for processing by search engines. Search Engines indexes the downloaded pages so that users can search more efficiently.

What are some of the implications of using web crawling software?

Crawlers consume resources on visited systems. It often visit websites unprompted. Issues such as schedule crawling, load, and politeness crawling come into play when large collections of webpages are accessed by crawlers. However, Mechanisms exist for public websites not wishing to be crawled to make this known to the crawling agent. For example, including a robots.txt file can request internet-bots to index only parts of a website, or nothing at all.

Does Crawlers are more efficient than early days of internet boom?

As we all know, The number of Internet pages is extremely large. At times, largest crawlers may fall short of making a complete web index. For the same reason, in the early years of the World Wide Web search engines struggled to give relevant search results. Whereas, Today, relevant results are given almost instantly by search engines.

What the different kinds of web crawlers?

General Purpose Web Crawlers are categorized according to architectures.
They are given below.

1. Historical web crawlers such as Yogoo! Slurp, WWW Worm
2. In-House Web Crawlers Such as Applebot, Googlebot, Bingbot
4. Commercial Web Crawlers such as Swiftbot, Sortsite
3. Open Source Crawlers such as GNA Wget, GRUB

Could you list out the 4 names of crawling policies?

Here the list of names of crawling policies of web crawlers.
1. a selection policy
2. a re-visit policy
3. a politeness policy
4. a parallelization policy

What is the purpose of different kinds of crawling policies?

selection policy

selection policy states the web pages to download,

re-visit policy

re-visit policy which states when to check for changes to the webpages

politeness policy

politeness policy that particularly states how to avoid overloading sites.

parallelization policy

It states how to coordinate with distributed web crawlers.

What decides the behavior of a Web crawler?

The behavior of a Web crawler is the outcome of a combination of policies it uses to crawl the WWW sites.

What is web spidering?

web spidering is the process of collecting, parsing, storing data & providing fast and accurate retrieval of content available on the internet. The result of this process is a structure, Which is named as index. It maps the collected information (for instance, words, phrases, concepts) to the internet location. It is usually possible to find content associated with the data at the internet location.

For instance, pages containing these words phrases, phrases, concepts. Based on the data collected, several indices could be created. This process could be manual or automatic. Manually generated indices include web directories, back-of-book-style indices, and meta data. Whereas, Automatically generated indices are usually linked to the infrastructure of search engines.

Does a web crawler must have highly optimized architecture?

Yes, A web crawler must have a good crawling strategy other than having a highly optimized architecture.

What is spamming of search engines?

As Web crawlers are a central part of search engine, The details of their algorithms and architecture are always kept as business secrets. When web crawler designs are usually published for the rest of the world, there is often an important lack of detail that prevents others from reproducing the work of the search engine. Because of fear of search engine spamming, major search engines stopped from publishing their ranking algorithms.

How to direct web crawlers not to craw certain webpages of site?

Yes, we can direct a Web Crawler not to crawl certain webpages of website. It can be done by using robots.txt.

How Googlebot Web Crawler treats robots.txt files?

Consider the following 3 scenarios.

Googlebot can’t find a robots.txt file

Lets assume Web Crawler like googlebot finds robots txt file for a website, It proceeds to crawl the website as usual.

Googlebot finds a robots.txt file

Googlebot Web Crawler will usually abide by the suggestions and proceed to crawl the site.

If Googlebot encounters an error

Lets assume, Web Crawler like google bot encounters an error while trying to access a website’s robots.txt file. It can not determine whether robots file exists or not. It won’t crawl the site.

What is Web Spidering?

Web Spidering is storing and organizing the content found during the crawling process by search engine. Once a webpage is in the index, it is displayed as a result to relevant queries by search engine.

What is the Difference between web spidering and Crawling ?

Here the main difference between Crawling & Web Spidering.

1. In SEO prospective, Crawling means “following the links”. where as, web spidering is the process of “adding webpages” to search engines database.
2. Crawling is the process through which web spidering is done. For instance, Google crawls through the web pages and do index the web pages.
When search engine crawlers visit any link it means that it is crawling the link. where as web crawlers save or index that links in search engine database is called web spidering.
3. Usually googlebot visits your website for tracking purpose. This process is performed by the Google’s Spiders or Crawlers. Once crawling has been done, the results will be placed on to Google’s index (i.e. web search). It means Crawling & web spidering is a step by step process.
4. Web Crawling is a process which is done by the search engine bots. It is done to discover publicly available web pages. whereas, web spidering means when search engine bots crawl the web pages and saves a copy of all information on index servers. And, search engines show the relevant results when a user do performs a search query on on search engine.
5. Web Crawlers finds pages and queues them for indexing. whereas, web spidering analyses the web pages content and saves the pages with quality content in index.
6. Crawlers crawls the web pages. whereas, web spidering performs analysis on the webpage content and stores it in the index.
7. Crawling is a simple process by the search engines bots. These bots actively crawl your website. Whereas, web spidering is the process of placing a page.
8. Crawling discovers the web crawler’s URLs by recursive visits of input of web pages.
Whereas, web spidering builds its index with every significant word on a web page found in the post title, post heading, meta tags, alt tags, post subtitles and other important positions.

Which web crawler bots are most active on the WWW?

The bots of major search engines are most actively crawling & are web spidering pages very effectively.
They are listed below.
a) Googlebot (Googlebot Desktop for desktop and Googlebot Mobile for mobile searches)
b) Bingbot
c) Yandex Bot
d) Baidu Spider
There are many other web crawler bots available in market, which may not be associated with any search engine.

What are the 5 Ways to Find Out Webpages which Are Not Ranking Well using Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an open source tool that crawls websites and finds out what pages aren’t ranking well. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an open-source tool that crawls websites for keywords and ranks each page based on how many times it appears in Google search results.

Check Page Titles & Descriptions.

If you’re not sure why some of your pages aren’t ranking as high as you’d like them to, use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check the titles and descriptions of your pages. You’ll find that these two elements make up 70% of a page’s score in Google.

Check Meta Tags.

Another reason why your pages might not be performing as well as you’d like is because of meta tags. These are hidden HTML code snippets that appear at the top of each web page. They tell search engines how to index your site.

Check URL Structure.

If you’re using a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., then you should check the URL structure of your website. This will help you identify any issues with your URLs.

Check Robots.txt File.

You can use Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to crawl your site and find out which pages aren’t ranking well by checking the robots.txt file.

Check HTML Source Code.

If you’re using Screaming Frog to check your website’s rankings, you’ll see a list of URLs with a green “OK” next to them. These are the pages that are ranked properly. However, if there’s a red “X” next to a URL, then it means that page isn’t being crawled by Googlebot. To fix this problem, you need to make sure that the robot.txt file has been updated correctly so that Googlebot will crawl those pages.

What are the Steps to Fixing Broken Links on Your Website with Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

ScreamingFrog SEO Spider is an open source tool that crawls websites and finds broken links. It’s perfect for fixing broken links on your website. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an open-source tool that crawls websites, finding broken links and other errors. It’s free, easy to use, and works well in most situations.

Install Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

If you’re looking to fix broken links on your site, then Screaming Frog SEO Spider will help you do just that. This tool allows you to crawl any website and find broken links, as well as other issues such as 404 pages, duplicate content, and more.

Run a crawl.

To run a crawl, simply enter the URL of the website you wish to crawl into the box below. You can also use the “Crawl Selected URLs” button to select multiple URLs at once. Once you click “Start Crawling,” Screaming Frog will begin crawling the selected URLs.

Find broken links.

If you find broken links on your site, you should fix them as soon as possible. A broken link is when a webmaster has removed a piece of content from a website. This means that any visitors who come across the link won’t be able to access the content.

Fix them.

You can use ScreamingFrog SEO spider to identify broken links on your website by running a crawl. Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to fix them. There are two ways to do this: manually or automatically.

Repeat.

If you’re using manual methods to find broken links, you should repeat the process until you’ve fixed every one. This will ensure that you’re not missing any broken links.

Why You Need an SEO Spider for Your Website?

ScreamingFrog SEO Spider is a free tool that helps you optimize your website by crawling through pages on your site and analyzing them for errors. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free web crawler that analyzes websites for errors and provides suggestions for how to improve search engine rankings.

Find out what’s wrong with your site.

If you’re not sure whether there are any issues with your website, Screaming Frog SEO Spider will crawl through every page on your site and analyze each one for errors. It’ll also provide recommendations for how to fix these issues so that your site ranks higher in Google.

Fix it.

A good place to start is to check out the Screaming Frog SEO Spider homepage. This tool crawls through your entire site and analyzes it for errors. Once you’ve identified what’s wrong, you can make changes to improve your rankings.

Test your changes.

If you’re using Screaming Frog to test your changes, you’ll need to wait until the crawl has finished before testing. To do so, click on the “Crawl” tab at the top of the screen. Then select the “Wait Until Crawl Is Complete” option.

Repeat until satisfied.

Once you’ve crawled your entire site, you should see a list of URLs with green check marks next to them. These are the URLs that were successfully crawled. Click on any URL to view its details.

Find out what’s wrong with your website.

If there are any red X’s next to the URLs, then something has gone wrong. This usually means that the crawler couldn’t access the page because of some sort of error. It might also mean that the page isn’t optimized for search engines.

Conclusion

Therefore, The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler. It allows you to crawl websites URLs and fetch key components. Further, It analyzes and audits technical and onsite SEO. You may download the lite version of it free of charge, or buy a license for extra advanced features.

Also, the Screaming Frog is a webmaster’s “go to” tool to get initial SEO audits and quick validations. It is flexible, powerful and low-price in case you wish to buy a license. And, Make use of SEO Spider each day as It’s extremely feature-rich, rapidly enhancing and regularly look for a brand-new use case.

Rahul Raheja

im using free version of Screaming frog application. It is a must need app for webmasters/publishers.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider: 10 Interesting FAQs