I can't crawl the archive of this website with Screaming Frog

[gjergjshala]

Hi

I'm trying to crawl this website (http://zeri.info/) with Screaming Frog but because of some technical issue with their site (i can't find what is causing it) i'm able to crawl only the first page of each category (ex. http://zeri.info/sport/) and then it will go to crawl each page of their archive (hundreds of thousands of pages) but it won't crawl the links inside these pages.

Thanks a lot!

[DirkC]

Did you put in some special filters - just tried to crawl the site & it seems to work just fine?

[LoganRay]

Try going to File > Default Conif > Clear Default Configuration. This happens to me sometimes as well as I've edited settings over time. Clearing it out and going back to default settings is usually quicker than clicking through the settings to identify which one is causing the problem.

[gjergjshala]

Hi Dirk

Thanks a lot for replying back. The issue is that Screaming Frog is crawling the archive pages (like these examples) but it won't crawl the articles that are listed inside these pages.

The hierarchy of the site goes like this:

Homepage
 - Categories (with about 20 articles in them)
  - Archive of that category (with all the remaining articles, which in this case means thousands since they are a news website)

Screaming Frog will crawl the homepage and categories ... but after it goes to the archive it won't crawl the articles inside archive, instead it will only crawl the pages (pagination) of that archive.

Thanks again.

[gjergjshala]

Hi Logan

I've tried going back to default configuration but it didn't help .. still i don't believe Screaming Frog is to blame, i think there is something wrong with the way the site has been developed (they are using a custom CMS) .. but i can't find the reason why this is happening. As soon as i find the solution then i can ask the guys who developed this site to make the necessary changes.

Thanks a lot.

[DirkC]

It think Screaming Frog is going nuts on the formkey value in the url which is constantly changing when changing pages.

Could you modify the settings of the spider to respect noindex & respect canonical - looks like this is solving the issue.

Alternatively you could rewrite the url to ignore the formkey (remove parameter)

Dirk

[gjergjshala]

I've tried changing settings to respect noindex & canonical .. it will stop crawling the archive pages but still it won't crawl the links inside those pages. (i've added NOINDEX, FOLLOW in all archive pagination pages)

What do you mean by rewriting the url to ignore the formkey? How do you think it should be.

Gjergji

[DirkC]

In the menu 'url rewriting' you can simply put the parameters the site should ignore (like date, formkey,..). I removed the formkey parameter and I checked the pages of the archive in Screaming Frog.

It is clearly able to detect all the internal links on the page - so will crawl them.

How are you certain that the pages below are not crawled - could you give a specific example of page that should be crawled but isn't?

Dirk

[gjergjshala]

Dirk, thanks a lot.

I just added "formkey" to be removed as a parameter and it seems to be working. I crawled 1k pages until now and i'm going to monitor how it goes.

The site has more than 400k pages so the process to crawl them all will take time (and i'm going to have to crawl each sector so i can create sitemaps for them).

Thanks again
Gjergj

[DirkC]

Great it worked. Just a small note - if Screaming Frog is getting confused by all these parameters, it could well be that Googlebot (while more sophisticated) is also having these issues. You could consider to exclude the formkey parameter in the Search Console (Crawl > URL parameters)

DIrk

[gjergjshala]

I can't make it work. After removing 'fromkey' parameter i was able to crawl 1.7k and it stopped there. The site has more than 400k pages so .. something must be wrong

I want to crawl only the root domain without subdomains and all i can crawl is around 2k pages.

Do you have any idea what might be happening?

[DirkC]

I think the issue comes from the way you handle the pagination and or the way your render archived pages. 
Example: First archive page of Aktuale

http://zeri.info/arkiva/?formkey=7301c1be1634ffedb1c3780e5063819b6ec19157&acid=aktuale

Clicking on page 2 adds the date

http://zeri.info/arkiva/?from=2016-06-01&until=2016-06-16&acid=aktuale&formkey=cc0a40ca389eb511b1369a9aa9da915826d6ca44&faqe=2#archive-results => I assume that you're only listing the articles published from June 1st till today.

If I check all the different section & the number of articles listed in each archive I get approx. 1200 pages - add some additional pages linked on these pages and you get to the 2K pages you mentioned.

There seems to be no possibility to reach the previously published content without executing a search - which Screaming Frog can't do. It's quite possible that this is causing issues for Google bot as well so I would try to fix this.

If you really want to crawl the full site in the mean time - add another rule in url rewriting - this time selecting 'regex replace' -

add regex: from=2016-06-01 
replace regex from=2010-01-01 (replace by the earliest date of publishing)

This way - the system will call url http://zeri.info/arkiva/?from=**2010-06-01**&until=2016-06-16&acid=kultura&formkey=5932742bd5dd77799524ba31b94928810908fc07&faqe=2 rather than the original one - listing all the articles instead of only the june articles.

Hope this helps.

Dirk