If you want to get serious with your search engine optimization, you’ll need to invest in the finest tools available to help you on your journey.
One such tool is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Its one of the most popular tools among SEOs and webmasters because of its unique features that help you to pull all kinds of information from a website.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider for Website Crawling
Screaming Frog is a reputable web crawler that can crawl any website. The program is capable of processing the findings in real-time. It can identify a lot of technical variables that your website needs to be improved on. Redirects, broken links, duplication of content, and more are all included.
This tool does a comprehensive analysis of your website, including its onsite components, as well as technical elements. It may evaluate the URL structure of your entire site. You can utilize the free Screaming Frog program to crawl up to 500 URLs. The program has a user-friendly interface and is capable of processing results at a rapid pace depending on the hardware you are using.
The HTTP status code of each URL is also shown in Screaming Frog results. You can sort URLs by length, non-ASCII URLs with a single click, and so on through the tool’s extensive filtering capabilities. XML sitemaps and robots.txt may also be produced using the program. Screaming Frog has several useful functions that every SEO professional should utilize.
If you need to crawl a 10,000 page-website, but all you have is a free version of ScreamingFrog that can only do 500, you don’t need to worry anymore.
Key features of Screaming Frog
- Find Broken Links
- Audit Redirects
- Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data
- Discover Duplicate Content
- Extract Data with XPath
- Review Robots & Directives
- Generate XML Sitemaps
- Integrate with GA, GSC & PSI
- Crawl JavaScript Websites
- Visualise Site Architecture
- Schedule Audits
- Compare Crawls & Staging
Unfortunately, this tool does not come without a price and can be out of the reach for some people, which is why we’re bringing you a great list of Screaming Frog alternatives that won’t cost you a penny! Let’s get started.
8 Screaming Frog Alternative Free
1. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu is a PC software that promotes itself as a tool for detecting broken links on your website.
Link Sleuth is a popular website crawling tool that can be an alternative to Screaming Frog. The major difference between the two crawlers is that Link Sleuth is much more basic in comparison, but it could work better for some people.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth has several versions, but the main version is free and downloaded from the site. The major advantage of using the tool is that it crawls through links to give you a list of:
- TITLE tag length
- META description length
- H1, H2 tags, and lengths
The app is completely free and has no limits, and it takes only a few seconds to download on any fast broadband connection. But, on the other hand, it’s extremely limited. All it does is check your links and tell you their condition and content. That’s all there is to the app; it’s over after that. It excels at what it does, but it doesn’t do a lot else.
2. WildShark
The free and simple Wildshark web scraping tool is from the marketing firm. Despite having more features than Xenu’s Link Sleuth, this program lacks usefulness. In addition, this software has fewer capabilities than Xenu’s Link Sleuth.
A Wildshark’ spider will check your website for missing titles, duplicate titles, and excessively short or long titles. They also search for missing or duplicate meta descriptions, which are important and can signal duplicate content concerns.
They’ll even inspect your meta description to ensure it’s not too long for Google. They’ll look for H tags that are missing, duplicate, or overused, as well as pages with overly long or short H tags, which might indicate code-breaking problems.
The tool also searches for broken links. However, I don’t believe it checks for redirects or other appropriate status codes, and it looks for image ALT tags.
3. Visual SEO Studio
The Visual SEO Studio offers both a free “community” edition and a paid “professional” version. But since this post is focused on free alternatives rather than other paid options, I’ll focus on the community version.
The free edition of VSS, like the free edition of Screaming Frog, has a maximum crawlable page count of 500. Unfortunately, it’s also limited to two concurrent connections, so it might take some time to traverse those 500 pages.
It will crawl and scratch your page titles and metadata and search for problems with HTTP and HTTPS. In addition, it can find damaged links, check your robots.txt directives, and create XML sitemaps for your site, at least in the limited way it can crawl.
It will provide recommendations for meta titles or missing entries, duplication concerns, short or overly long titles, the absence of metadata, and other SEO recommendations. I’m not sure if it’s been updated to work with Google’s new longer meta titles; just keep that in mind.
4. SiteAnalyzer
The SiteAnalyzer crawling tool is quite comparable to its premium counterparts. It matches 80% of the features offered by Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider. Most of the paid alternatives, on the other hand, do not have some of SiteAnalyzer’s functions, such as website structure visualization on a graph. The most appealing aspect of it is that you don’t need a license. All of the tools needed for website audits are completely free!
SiteAnalyzer offers professionals the ability to modify and store projects as lists in a centralized repository for future reference. In addition, it includes various tools such as data filtering, a multilingual user interface, XML sitemap creation, and more.
SEO experts can also conduct SEO audits and monitor websites for any SEO or internal optimization mistakes to assure that they adhere to industry standards. SiteAnalyzer allows users to produce crawling reports and export the data in CSV, Excel, or PDF formats. The software is accessible for free, with assistance available through FAQs, manuals, and other online measures.
5. Spotibo
Like many other SEO crawlers before and after, Spot is a basic search engine optimization tool with a free edition with a crawl limit of 500 pages. The major advantage, though, is that it’s a web app rather than a downloadable application.
It crawls your site, reporting the status codes of the links it discovers. It looks for server status codes on your sites, as well as redirects, 404s, and other issues. It searches for content problems, including broken URL structures, incorrect meta titles and descriptions, and missing alt tags. It also checks images for their URLs, titles.
6. Webbe
The Webber website scanner has a wide range of criteria to evaluate and produces graphical representations of information. It may be linked with Google Analytics. The following are some of its drawbacks: poorly visualized graphs; no bespoke filters for data; there might be additional parameters to examine. 2015’s most recent version was released in 2015.
Webbee 3. will enable you to optimize the visibility of any web page by giving all the information needed for this task. Discover page errors and track all the data you need, thanks s to this powerful SEO scanner.
7. Link Assistant’s Website Auditor
The Link Assistant’s Website Auditor gives a maximum of 500 URLs for analysis and overall statistics, which is the standard. In addition, it can generate a sitemap for you and manage your robots.txt file.
There’s a lot going on when it comes to what it searches for. First, you’ll get a complete HTML scan looking for errors and best practices violations. Second, you’ll receive a comprehensive indexation analysis. Duplicate content searches and optimization choices are included in the package. Finally, the package includes social media monitoring, as well as an SEO-friendly content analysis.
You may also get some competitive analysis out of the program. It supports “up to 571 search engines,” but only a few of them are genuinely essential. There are SERP reporting, branded reports, customizable templates, and workspace restrictions. It works with any operating system and uses a proxy server connection to offer real-time updates.
You do, however, lose access to data exports, Dropbox storage, and cloud storage. In addition, you can’t run scheduled tasks, print reports, or send reports. In other words, you’re restricted to viewing your data straight through the app. That isn’t a negative thing; the program has a lot of useful filtering and display options that allow you to see the data you need without being overwhelmed.
8. Scrutiny
Scrutiny is a Mac program rather than a Windows-focused crawler, as many other options are. As a result, it’s one of the best choices for modern SEOs. It has a free trial and a one-time fee of $115, after which it goes for $67 per year.
The program will do link verification in a similar way to Xenu or Screaming Frog. It crawls your pages and seeks links and their statuses, and it can also log into members sections and scan links inside PDF documents and render scripts to display content before crawling.
Conclusion
So there you have it these . These free alternatives for Screaming Frog! There are many free alternatives to Screaming Frog. It’s important to think about what you need your crawler for and how much time or resources you have before making a purchase decision.
If any of these Screaming Frog Alternative for Free seem like they would be perfect for your needs, let us know in the comments below.
Happy Seo-ing!
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