Anybody using Screaming Frog?

[danatanseo]

In a recent Q & A session Rand had together with Dharmesh Shah over at Hubspot, Rand mentioned Screaming Frog as one of his favorite SEO tools. I'd heard of it, but never checked it out before. I downloaded it a couple of days ago and was pretty impressed. It seems to me that it gives a lot of the same data as GWT but in more actionable form (i.e. you can export everything into Excel).

I am curious to know others' opinions, how much they use it, unique applications, what it does that SEOMoz doesn't do, and whether or not you think the annual license fee is worth it.

Thanks!

[SanketPatel]

Hi Dana,

I am using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider for quick analyses, audit and review a site it is best to know onsite SEO perspective. It’s particularly good for analyzing medium to large sites where manually checking every page would be impossible and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue. It is helpful  to get inbound and outbound link. It is also best to know meta titles and description, header text and status code of each page which is not possible to see manually if we have large site.

[Debdulal]

_Hi I am using it for the past 2 years and I am very much satisfied. In fact, I cannot even analyze a website if I do not have access to this brilliant tool. _

_They give you data than Google Webmaster tools can provide and I do personally feel that it is not good for us to wait for Google to find the flaws in our website; rather we should use this tool to fix those flaws proactively. _

_But go for the paid version and You will Definitely get benefited. I am 100% certain. _

[danatanseo]

Thanks Deb. This is what I was thinking too. I know GWT doesn't update in real time and it also doesn't allow you to analyze competitors. Those are big selling points.

[supermarketonline]

I watched the same video by rand...trotted away...and downloaded the software.  I only got the free version and it seeked..ok.  I belive it was mentioned with regard to finding out links that are broken / missing.  I would really like to see this from seomoz  - its great that i can run a report to see where my links are up to but without using excel and doing a vlookup i cant see a way of tracking which link i am no longer getting.

[semetrical-197165]

Good crawlers are always useful although real value depends on what aspects of a site you want to analyse and how much data there is to crawl.  Xenu is great for quick and dirty link analysis, whereas Screaming Frog, (Microsoft's IIS) SEO Toolkit and DeepCrawl all include much more detail and analysis options. Also worth noting that Screaming Frog and SEO Toolkit run from your local machine, whereas DeepCrawl is cloud based and therefore more scalable. There might be other SEO crawlers out there too but these are the ones I use most.