I figured I’d throw this out there for anyone looking for a new bot to use on their site to get information and to check to see if everything is working properly when accurately scrubbed via a robot/spider. A new product has recently come out that’s both free(one I use) and paid. I believe the free version scans up to 500 pages, and if you’re working with a smaller site it’s an ideal product.
Since this blog is all about seo, I figured I would be doing my part by giving a pretty new product a chance to be seen by more people that may not have even been looking for it. Here’s a little information on the product described directly from the landing page of their website;
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program you can install on your PC or Mac which spiders websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches key onsite page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data how you see fit by exporting into Excel. You can view, analyse and filter the crawl data as it’s gathered and updated continuously in the program’s user interface.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to quickly analyse, audit and review a site from an onsite SEO perspective. It’s particularly good for analyzing medium to large sites where manually checking every page would be extremely labor intensive (or impossible!) and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue.
All in all, it may just come down to preference but so far it’s a tool that I’ve used enough that has made me actually want to use it more and really work with it to see it’s true potential. I just figured I’d throw it out there and see if anyone has used it, or maybe give it a try and let me know what they think.