Screaming Frog - What are your "go to" tasks you use it for?

[TheWebMastercom]

So, I have just purchased screaming frog because I have some specific tasks that need completing.  However, looking at Screaming Frog generally, there is so much information I was wondering for those who use it, what are the top key tasks you use it for.  I mean what are your "go to" things you like to check, that perhaps are not covered by the Moz Crawl reports.

Just looking for things I perhaps hadn't thought about, that this might be useful for.

[Allie_Williams]

Ha ha, I know! It's like giving the developers a little present all wrapped up with a bow...here's the problem, and here's where to fix it

[AlanBleiweiss]

Allie,

That's a great example use-case. After my audits, clients are like "you found thousands of internal redirects and 404s - where are they?"

I'm like - hold on I have a spreadsheet of that!

[Allie_Williams]

I love Screaming Frog! One use case I've used recently is using it to find internal 404 errors prior-to and immediately-after a major site redesign.

After running a crawl, go to Bulk Export > Response Code > Client error (4xx) Inlinks and download the report. It shows the offending URL and the URL referring to it, which makes it easier to update the bad link.

I also have this page bookmarked, and it's my go-to guide:

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/

[MattAntonino]

It's one of the best tools so I feel like I use it "for everything."  But some includes:

• Title / meta duplication & finding parameters on ecomm stores

• Title length & meta desc length

• Removing meta keywords fields

• Finding errant pages (anything but 200, 301, 302, or 404 status code)

• Large sitemap export (most tools do "up to 500 pages."  Useless.)

• Bulk export of external links (what ARE we linking to??)

• Quickly opening a page in Wayback Machine or Google cache

• Finding pages without Analytics, as was mentioned.

I use Screaming Frog for tons of other things. Finding the AJAX escaped frag URL, identifying pages with 2 titles, 2 canonicals, 2 H1 tags, etc. Even seeing www & non-www versions live, links to pages that shouldn't be linked and http vs https.

Very cool tool - useful for pretty much everything! haha

[TheWebMastercom]

That's awesome.  Thanks.  Will take a look at all those things this week.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I use SF religiously for all the audit work I do. I run a sample crawl (using Googlebot as the crawler) to check for all the standard stuff and go further.

My standard evaluation with SF includes:

• Redirect / dead end internal linking
• Redirect / dead end "external" links that point to site assets housed on CDN servers.
• URL hierarchical structure
• Internal linking to both http and https that can reinforce duplicate content conflicts
• Page Title/H1 topical focus relevance and quality
• Confusion from improperly "nofollowing" important pages (meta robots)
• Conflicts between meta robots and canonical tags
• Slow page response times
• Bloated HTML or image file sizes
• Thin content issues (word count)
• Multiple instances of tags that should only have one instance (H1 headline tags, meta robots tags, canonical tags)

[TheWebMastercom]

That crawl path report is pretty cool, and it led me to the redirect chain report, which I have a few issues to resolve with that with a few multiple redirects on some old links.  Fantastic stuff.

[DirkC]

I am a big fan of Screaming frog myself. Apart from the real basic stuff (checking H1, titles,...etc) it's also useful to check if all your pages contain your analytics tag and to check the size of the images on the site (these things Moz can't do).

It's also extremely useful when you're changing the url structure to check if all the redirects are properly implemented.

Sometimes you get loops in your site, especially if you use relative rather than absolute links on your site - Screaming Frog has an extremely helpful feature: just click on the url  and select "crawl path report" - which generates an xls which shows the page where the problem originates

It's also very convenient that you can configure the spider to ignore robots.txt / nofollow / noindex when you are test a site in a pre-production environment. Idem for the possibility to use regex to filter some of the url's while crawling (especially useful for big sites if the they aren't using canonicals or noindex where they should use it)

rgds,

Dirk