The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • My Q&A
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. SEO and Digital Marketing Q&A Forum
    2. Categories
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. ScreamingFrog won't crawl my site.

    ScreamingFrog won't crawl my site.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    7 6 7.0k
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • FrederikTrovatten22
      FrederikTrovatten22 last edited by

      Hey guys,

      My site is Netspiren.dk and when I use a tool like Screaming Frog or Integrity, it only crawls my homepage and menu's - not product-pages.

      Examples
      A menu: http://www.netspiren.dk/pl/Helse-Kosttilskud-Blandingsolie_57699.aspx
      A product: http://www.netspiren.dk/pi/All-Omega-3-6-9-180-kapsler_1412956_57699.aspx

      Is it because the products are being loaded in Javascript? 
      What's your recommendation?

      All best,
      Fred.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • PatrickDelehanty
        PatrickDelehanty last edited by

        Hi there

        It's crawling for me. Here are a list of reasons why ScreamingFrog won't crawl your site:

        • The site is blocked by robots.txt. A count of pages blocked by robots.txt is shown in the crawl overview pane on top right hand site of the user interface. You can configure the SEO Spider to ignore robots.txt by going to the “Basic” tab under Configuration->Spider.
        • The site behaves differently depending on User Agent. Try changing the User Agent under Configuration->User Agent.
        • The site requires JavaScript. Try looking at the site in your browser with JavaScript disabled.
        • The site requires Cookies. Can you view the site with cookies disabled in your browser? Licenced users can enable cookies by going to Configuration->Spider and ticking “Allow Cookies” in the “Advanced” tab.
        • The ‘nofollow’ attribute is present on links not being crawled. There is an option in Configuration->Spider under the “Basic” tab to follow ‘nofollow’ links.
        • The page has a page level ‘nofollow’ attribute. The could be set by either a meta robots tag or an X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. These can be seen in the “Directives” tab in the “Nofollow” filter.
        • The website is using framesets. The SEO Spider does not crawl the frame src attribute.
        • The Content-Type header did not indicate the page is html. This is shown in the Content column and should be either text/html or application/xhtml+xml.

        Run through your settings and check and see if you may have turned something on inadvertently that you didn't mean to. One thing you can try, is goto Configuration > Spider and then goto the last option Ignore robots.txt. Click the checkbox and try running it again.

        It could just be a slow connection on your end. Give it a few minutes and see if any of the above suggestions work.

        Hope this helps! Good luck!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • Andy.Drinkwater
          Andy.Drinkwater last edited by

          I have sent Dan from Screaming Frog a tweet for you Fred. I'm sure he will be along presently 🙂

          -Andy

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Andy.Drinkwater
            Andy.Drinkwater last edited by

            This post is deleted!
            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • screamingfrog
              screamingfrog last edited by

              Cheers @Andy & @Patrick 🙂

              Hi Fred,

              I haven't performed an extensive check, but the SEO Spider crawls around 35 URLs with /pi/ in the string, which is presumably not all the products on the site 🙂

              Patrick actually mentions the issue in one of his points above. Essentially it looks like the site uses JavaScript on category pages for products, example - http://www.netspiren.dk/pl/Helse-Homøopati-Allergica-Ron-serien_58721.aspx

              If you disable JS in your browser, you'll see a blank page where the products were. Our tool doesn't execute JS, although Google is much smarter and often can.

              However, I'll leave you to verify that -

              http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HBwmVULX5zYJ:www.netspiren.dk/pl/Helse-Hom%25C3%25B8opati-Allergica-Ron-serien_58721.aspx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

              Hope that helps!

              Cheers

              Dan

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
              • TheeDigital
                TheeDigital last edited by

                I'm not sure if this has been fixed already, and thank you for Dan for chiming in, but I was able to crawl around 700 URLs.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • whiteonlySEO
                  whiteonlySEO last edited by

                  Hi,

                  Thank you for this question and the responses because we encountered the same issue; Screaming Frog was only crawling a handful of products out of hundreds, because of JS. We made significant changes to the redirect rules on our dev site, and we want to make sure that the changes will not cause any crawling errors before we deploy to the live site. Is there any way to disable JS just for the purpose of a Screaming Frog crawl?

                  Our dev site is: https://msc-nop.com

                  Our regular site is: https://medicalscrubscollection.com

                  Thanks in advance!

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post
                  • Can't support IE 7,8,9, 10\. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern browers while still providing a destination of IE browsers?
                    0
                    1
                    18

                  • Why doesn't my website crawl by Google?
                    LoganRay
                    LoganRay
                    0
                    8
                    82

                  • Why isn't the canonical tag on my client's Magento site working?
                    Inevo
                    Inevo
                    0
                    3
                    226

                  • When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
                    DirkC
                    DirkC
                    0
                    3
                    1.4k

                  • 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.
                    PeteC12
                    PeteC12
                    0
                    3
                    117

                  • - Truth ? ''link building isn't considered a suitable way of promotion as per recent search engine updates''
                    JaneCopland
                    JaneCopland
                    1
                    4
                    89

                  • After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
                    evolvingSEO
                    evolvingSEO
                    0
                    4
                    394

                  • Why isn't google indexing our site?
                    MikeTek
                    MikeTek
                    0
                    18
                    438

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy