Will Screaming Frog Identify Redirect Chains for 302 Redirects?

[danatanseo]

Hi guys. I know that Screaming Frog has a nifty report for Redirect Chains and that it identifies chains of 301 redirects. What I am trying to find out is if it will identify chains of 302 redirects? If not, is there a way to configure a report or mine that data out of Screaming Frog (or any other tool)?

Thanks!

[trung.ngo]

Hi! The Screaming Frog 'Redirect Chains' report covers both 301 and 302 redirects. However, I will say that in many cases I have found errors in those reports.

If you want to go the safe route, I'd recommend the following:

1. Crawl the site
2. Export the results
3. Filter by URLs responding 301/302 in Excel
4. Run that list through Screaming Frog
5. Export and use VLOOKUP to pull in HTTP Status Codes to a master Excel Workbook
6. Repeat until all URLs respond 200 or 404, or with a client error

Essentially, this is a manual process for constructing the 'Redirect Chains' report, which, while a bit time consuming, I've found to be much more reliable.

-Trung

[danatanseo]

Hi Trung, Thanks so much for your excellent suggestion. I'm going to try it out. You did confirm a hunch that I had a while back that the data in the Redirect Chains report wasn't spot on. I'll report back here with what I discover. I appreciate you responding!

[screamingfrog]

Hey Danatanseo,

The redirect chain report will report on chains of any redirects, whether 301, 302 (303, 307 etc) or a combination.

During normal 'spider' mode when you're crawling a full site, there isn't a special set-up, you can just crawl away and then export the report to see any chains that have been discovered.

However, (this will be relevant to Trung too :-), if you're auditing redirects in list mode (so for site migrations for example), then you'll need to remember to use the 'Always Follow Redirects' option and process discussed here -

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/audit-redirects/

You'll then be able to export a report which provides every URL in the original upload and their responses. For any URLs which redirect, the spider will follow the hop until they reach a 2XX, 4XX, 5XX etc and map these out for you in their row in the report. The report will also tell you how many hops there are and if there are any redirect loops etc as well. We built this specifically for site and domain migrations when you need to audit redirects from one to another, as it used to be such a pain in the @ss.

Hope that helps anyway.

Cheers.

Dan

Btw - You can always ping over any queries to our support (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/support/), I just happened to notice this thread via Google alert.

[danatanseo]

Thanks for hopping in guys. You're awesome. This is a perfect example why Moz Q & A rocks Yes, my reason for asking was specifically related to site migration. Your answer is greatly appreciated.

Dana

[trung.ngo]

I second this! Thanks for the recommendations, Dan

-Trung

[screamingfrog]

Not a problem, thanks for the kind comments both!

Cheers.

Dan