10 Web-crawling Tools You Can Use To Spider Your Site

Let's face it; not everyone is as meticulous as they should be when managing and maintaining their website; a lot can fall through the cracks. Either you're a small team who do not have the capacity, or you're a large team, with a lot of moving parts and things slip through the cracks. 

Web pages are created and forgotten about daily, pages are hidden, broken, orphaned, and if not managed, can turn into a nightmare of SEO specialist proportions. 

Before you call in the big guns, try running a web crawl of your site to see the size and state of it.

What is a web-crawler?

A web crawler or if you want to sound more dramatic, web spider, web robot or web bot is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. 

The process of scanning through your website is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites use web crawlers; however, the most advanced and most popular would search engines like Google and Bing who keep their search results fresh by spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

What does a web-crawler do?

These crawlers scan web pages to see what words, images, and video they contain, and where this content is used and who is pointing to this content, is it a reliable source of information. The crawler turns its findings into a large index and matches keywords users search for to the pages in its index. So how do you see what these bots see? Fortunately for us, there are web crawling tools available to simulate this process and create your own miniature index of your site.

A website crawl of the nichemarket website

What are web-crawling tools and which ones are available?

1. Visual SEO Studio

Visual SEO Studio - €149 Per Year

The basic version is free but is extremely restrictive. In contrast, the paid version offers you comprehensive SEO suggestions, full control of your XML Sitemap and a powerful SEO-oriented query engine.

Only available for Windows Get it here: http://visual-seo.com/

2. Wild Shark SEO

WildShark SEO Spider Tool - FREE

A standard website crawler and gives you access to the usual like missing H tags, title tags, and ALT tags, finding broken links and duplicate meta tags. You will have to fill in a form before you can download and subscribe to their newsletter database. Only available for Windows

Get it here: https://wildshark.co.uk/spider-tool/

3. Beam Us Up

Beam Us Up SEO Spider - FREE

Offers no crawl limits and is a beast at finding duplicate pages and also offers users the option of exporting data directly into excel and google docs. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Get it here: http://beamusup.com/

4. Xenu

Xenu - FREE

Xenu operates like a crawler, though, it can help test crawl paths and find holes in your internal linking and offer great reporting. Only available for Windows

Get it here: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

5. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog - £149 Per Year

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyse onsite SEO. Downloading the tool is free but offers limited access. Available for Mac and Windows

Get it here: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

6. Scrapy

Scrapy - FREE

For the more advanced requirements, you can try using Scrapy, which is open source and collaborative framework for building your own crawlers that extract the data you need from websites.

Get it here: https://scrapy.org/

7. Cocoscan

Cocoscan - Per scan purchase starts at $20

CocoScan is a simple SEO scan tool that analyses your website and finds all the factors that block the indexation of your web pages. Choose our site crawler, and we promise to find your main SEO issues in less than 5 minutes. Once you've completed your scan, you can access your results and work your way through your personalised to-do list.

Get it here: https://cocoscan.io

8. Netpeak Software

Netpeak Spider - FREE version trial or get more features with an annual subscription of $182.40

Netpeak Software is a combined SEO tool kit with some handy tools, but we will only focus on the spider/crawling tool option. You will need to download the Netpeak launcher which is currently only available for Windows, so Mac users are out of luck. Once you've downloaded the launcher you can then install the various packages they have available like the Netpeak Spider.

The UX takes, some getting used to and the number of loops you have to jump through to get the software running isn't the most exceptional experience either. They do provide chat support should you eventually get stuck, which you most likely will.

However, once you get through all of the setup steps, you'll find Netpeak Spider it is still a pretty good scraping tool option for your website.

Get it here: https://netpeaksoftware.com

Note! Did you know Netpeak Software and nichemarket are partners? Find out more and claim your discounted subscription here.

9. cognitiveSEO

cognitiveSEO Site audit - 7-day trial starting at $129/ month

cognitiveSEO is a toolset focusing on-site audit that also includes content audits, backlink analysis, keywords research & rank tracking, content optimization and many more. The site audit tool collects data about your site and detects all the SEO issues of your business. It provides friendly UX pointing out all the errors that are holding your website back from ranking and performing at its best. You can easily run a technical SEO audit to check your website's health and fix all the issues.

Get it here: https://cognitiveseo.com/

10. Site Checker Pro

Site Checker Pro audit - A free 150 page-scrape, 7 Day trial with packages starting at $23 per month

Starting in 2016 Sitechecker can be used to review your website, find errors and locate weak spots. Using their service, users can gain access to an easy to understand dashboard that provides suggestions on how to fix issues, and thereby improve the website’s overall performance and Google ranking.

Get it here: https://sitechecker.pro/

Keep your site in order

There you have it seven tools you can use to scrape your site and get a grand overview of what is going on and see bots are dealing with when visiting your site. 

You can then use these scrapes to remove dead pages, redirect broken pages, improve page quality and so much more.

Page crawling tools like these offer a wealth of data, especially when sites start to scale, and you need more than a few hands on deck to manage changes and updates to the site. 

So go ahead, pick a tool, and I wish you many happy site scraping adventures shortly.

Contact us

If you want to know more, about web-crawlers, don’t be shy we’re happy to assist. Simply contact us here.

Are you looking to promote your business?

South African Business owners can create your free business listing on nichemarket. The more information you provide about your business, the easier it will be for your customers to find you online. Registering with nichemarket is easy; all you will need to do is head over to our sign up form and follow the instructions.

If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile 
• How to create a nichemarket business listing 

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a few minutes to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, then we recommend you read the following article

• How To Run The Ultimate Website Crawl
• 13 Steps To Maximise Your Crawl Budget
• How To Use External Linking To Build New Content

Tags: SEO, Tools