Setting A Custom User Agent in Screaming Frog
-
Hi all,
Probably a dumb question, but I wanted to make sure I get this right.
How do we set a custom user agent in Screaming Frog? I know its in the configuration settings, but what do I have to do to create a custom user agent specifically for a website?
Thanks much!
- Malika
-
Setting a custom user agent determines things like HTTP/2 so there can be a big difference if you change it to something that might not take advantage of something like HTTP/2
Apparently, it is coming to Pingdom very soon just like it is to Googlebot
http://royal.pingdom.com/2015/06/11/http2-new-protocol/
This Is an excellent example of a user agent's ability to modify the way your site is crawled as well as how efficient it is.
https://www.keycdn.com/blog/https-performance-overhead/
It is important to note that we didn’t use Pingdom in any of our tests because they use Chrome 39, which doesn’t support the new HTTP/2 protocol. HTTP/2 in Chrome isn’t supported until Chrome 43. You can tell this by looking at the
User-Agent
in the request headers of your test results.Pingdom user-agent
Note: WebPageTest uses Chrome 47 which does support HTTP/2.
Hope that clears things up,
Tom
-
Hi Malika,
Think about screaming frog and what it has to detect in order to do that correctly it needs the correct user agent syntax for it will not be able to make a crawl that would satisfy people.
Using a proper syntax for a user agent is essential and I have tried to be non-technical in this explanation I hope it works.
the reason screaming frog needs the user agent because the user-agent was added to HTTP to help web application developers deliver a better user experience. By respecting the syntax and semantics of the header, we make it easier and faster for header parsers to extract useful information from the headers that we can then act on.
Browser vendors are motivated to make web sites work no matter what specification violations are made. When the developers building web applications don’t care about following the rules, the browser vendors work to accommodate that. It is only by us application developers developing a healthy respect
When the developers building web applications don’t care about following the rules, the browser vendors work to accommodate that. It is only by us application developers developing a healthy respect
It is only by us application developers developing a healthy respect for the standards of the web, that the browser vendors will be able to start tightening up their codebase knowing that they don’t need to account for non-conformances.
For client libraries that do not enforce the syntax rules, you run the risk of using invalid characters that many server side frameworks will not detect. It is possible that only certain users, in particular, environments would identify the syntax violation. This can lead to difficult to track down bugs.
I hope this is a good explanation I've tried to keep it very to the point.
Respectfully,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas,
would you have a simpler tutorial for me to understand? I am struggling a bit.
Thanks heaps in advance
-
I think I want something that is dumbed down to my level for me to understand. The above tutorials are great but not being a full time coder, I get lost while reading those.
-
Hi Matt,
I havent had a luck with this one yet.
-
Hi Malika! How'd it go? Did everything work out?
-
happy I could be of help let me know if there's any issue and I will try to be of help with it. All the best
-
Hi Thomas,
That's a lot of useful information there. I will have a go on it and let you know how it went.
Thanks heaps!
-
please let me know if I did not answer the question or you have any other questions
-
this gives you a very clear breakdown of user agents and their set of syntax rules. The following is valid example of user-agent that is full of special characters,
read this please http://www.bizcoder.com/the-much-maligned-user-agent-header
user-agent: foo&bar-product!/1.0a$*+ (a;comment,full=of/delimiters
references but you want to pay attention to the first URL
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0 |
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15069533/http-request-header-useragent-variable
-
if you formatted it correctly see below
User-Agent = product *( RWS ( product / comment ) )
and it was received by your headers yes you could fill in the blanks and test it.
https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/webviews-and-user-agent-strings
http://mobiforge.com/news-comment/standards-and-browser-compatibility
-
No, you Cannot just put anything in there. The site has to recognize it and ask why you are doing this?
I have listed how to build and already built in addition to what your browser will create by using useragentstring.com
Must be formatted correctly and have it work with a header it is not as easy as it sometimes seems but not that hard either.
You can make & use this to make your own from your Mac or PC
http://www.useragentstring.com/
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2747.0 Safari/537.36
how to build a user agent
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Setting_HTTP_request_headers
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503(VS.85).aspx
Lists of user agents
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503(v=vs.85).aspx
-
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for responding, much appreciated!
Does that mean, if I type in something like -
HTTP request user agent -
Crawler access V2
&
Robots user agent
Crawler access V2
This will work too?
-
To crawl using a different user agent, select ‘User Agent’ in the ‘Configuration’ menu, then select a search bot from the drop-down or type in your desired user agent strings.
http://i.imgur.com/qPbmxnk.png
&
Video http://cl.ly/gH7p/Screen Recording 2016-05-25 at 08.27 PM.mov
Or
Also see
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/#user-agent
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/faq/
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Suggested Screaming Frog configuration to mirror default Googlebot crawl?
Hi All, Does anyone have a suggested Screaming Frog (SF) configuration to mirror default Googlebot crawl? I want to test my site and see if it will return 429 "Too Many Requests" to Google. I have set the User Agent as Googlebot (Smartphone). Is the default SF Menu > Configuration > Speed > Max Threads 5 and Max URLs 2.0 comparable to Googlebot? Context:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gravymatt-se
I had tried NetPeak SEO Spider which did a nice job and had a cool feature that would pause a crawl if it got to many 429. Long Story short, B2B site threw 429 Errors when there should have been no load on a holiday weekend at 1:00 AM.0 -
Setting up redirects from non wordpress
Hi, we are rebuilding our site which was built on WordPress. The old permalink structure was /%post_id%/%postname%/ The new site is a custom build (not Wordpress), however, we are using WordPress for blog posts. The URL structure is www.customewebsite/blog/ As the custom site is not WordPress, we do not know how to create a redirect to push the WordPress url /%post_id%/ to the /blog section of the new site. What we currently get is page not found. Can anyone help with the htaccess redirect code? Many thanks one and all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Google User Click Data and Metrics
Assuming that Google is using click data from users to calculate rankings (bounce rate, time on site, task completion, etc.) where does Google get the data, especially from browsers that aren't Chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
How does Tripadviser ensure all their user reviews get crawled?
Tripadvisor has a LOT of user generated content. Searching for a random hotel always seems to return a paginated list of 90+ pages. However once the first page is clicked and "#REVIEWS" is appended to the URL, the URL never changes with any subsequent clicks of the paginated links. How do they ensure that all this review content gets crawled? Thanks, linklater
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | linklater0 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins2000 -
How can I track traffic source for each user?
We received an enquiry on one of our landing pages and I am trying to track down where that user come from? Whether he came from social networks or search engines and if it is from search engine which keywords he used etc.. Does anyone know if there is any way I could see that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Followup question to rand(om) question: Would two different versions (mobile/desktop) on the same URL work well from an SEO perspective and provide a better overall end-user experience?
We read today's rand(om) question on responsive design. This is a topic we have been thinking about and ultimately landing on a different solution. Our opinion is the best user experience is two version (desktop and mobile) that live on one URL. For example, a non-mobile visitor that visits http://www.tripadvisor.com/ will see the desktop (non-responsive) version. However, if a mobile visitor (i.e. iOS) visits the same URL they will see a mobile version of the site, but it is still on the same URL There is not a separate subdomain or URL - instead the page dynamically changes based on the end user's user agent. It looks like they are accomplishing this by using javascript to change the physical layout of the page to match the user's device. This is what we are considering doing for our site. It seems this would simultaneously solve the problems mentioned in the rand(om) question and provide an even better user experience. By using this method, we can create a truly mobile version of the website that is similar to an app. Unfortunately, mobile versions and desktop users have very different expectations and behaviors while interacting with a webpage. I'm interested to hear the negative side of developing two versions of the site and using javascript to serve the "right" version on the same URL. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidangotti0