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
-
Can I use the same set of social media accounts on two sites?
I have a client who's company name / main site name is not his name. All his social accounts connected to his site are in his name. The site is verified with Google Places, etc. Now he asked for me to create a site for him in his own name with some similar info and a lot of new info. The million dollar question is do I use the same social media accounts on the new site? Facebook, twitter, youtube, etc? Will that hurt the organic rankings of the main site? I've seen this similar situation before. You may have someone who works at a large corporation who is mentioned on the main site has their own personal profile site just about them. Where they can go more in depth about things they are doing. If the other set of social account where in the company name it would be a no brainer to create new social accounts in his name. The issue is the main companies social accounts are already in his name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markpine3600 -
Is a dynamic online user list bad for SEO?
Hello everyone, I have a question that is currently puzzling me, and I hope you can help me with. On musicianspage.com (one of our websites), we show a list of online users embedded within the page which, as you may expect, changes all the time according to who's online at that moment. That list appears on every page of the site, so at any time any page on the site has a different content and different link profile (sometimes we have just a few users connected, other times we may have over 50 users connected at the same time). My question is: is such a "dynamical-embedded" list bad, good or neutral from a SEO stand point? If it is bad, what do you suggest to do? Put it inside a frame? Using AJAX? Any thoughts and suggestions are very welcome! Thanks in advance to anyone reading this. All the best, Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
Best way to re-order page elements based on search engine users
Both versions of the page has essentially same content, but in different order. One is for users coming from Google (and google bot) and other is for everybody else. Questions: Is it cloaking? what will be the best way to re-order elements on the page: totally different style sheets for each version, or calling in different divs in a same style sheet? Is there any better way to re-order elements based on search engine? Let me make it clear again: the content is same for everyone, just in different order for visitors coming from Google and everybody else. Don't ask me the reason behind it (executive orders!!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StickyRiceSEO0 -
What redirect code (301,302,303) should I use for pages that are available only for logged in users?
If for example they go to a page like /premium-content, they will be automatically redirected (302) to the login page. Because now I do a 302 redirect, in Google Webmaster Tools it sais I have duplicate title issues for each of the pages that are accessible only for the logged in users. If I would do a 301 redirect, I basically tell Google that those pages are moved, but it is not the case because logged in users will see those pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STEFANOAGBAGLA0 -
Website domain hosting and set-up for foreign domains?
Hi, I am just wondering what the best practice is for marketing a business in two separate countries? I have a new client that wants me to create their website targeted at the UK market which for me is normal but they also want to target Australia (Probably couldn't get any further away) My initial thoughts are that the business would need two separate websites. The first one in the uk and the second website hosted on servers in Australia with different content. Is this correct? or does anyone have any advice which may simplify getting this thing off the ground. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1 -
What is the best practice when a client is setting up multiple sites/domains
I have a client that is creating separate websites to be used for different purposes. What is the best practice here with regards to not looking spammy. i.e. do the domains need to registered with different companies? hosted on different servers, etc? Thanks in advance for your response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-1718030