One of the best SEO site evaluation programs out there just got better! Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Development system, which got its start in 2010, crawls your site and collects important data. It is widely used to identify technical issues and provide a base for SEO recommendations. Digital Firefly Marketing uses Screaming Frog frequently when preparing audits, looking for things like broken links, page titles and clean URLs. But at the start of 2013, Screaming Frog launched two updated versions, including several new features like:

• Configuration saving – Allows for a number of configurations to be saved and accessed quickly.
• Speed measurement – Identifies slow loading pages by collecting response times for URLs.
• Export link data in bulk – Save lots of link data on your hard drive without having to restart Screaming Frog.
• Accepts cookies – Some websites don’t allow Screaming Frog to crawl the site without this feature, search bots for example do not accept cookies.
• Response timeout – Now the SEO spider’s URL response time is configurable, so very slow loading websites won’t take as long.
• New filters – SEO data search tools are more exact due to several new filters, such as page titles with under 30 characters or meta descriptions with under 70 characters.

Spider Tool

These are just a few of the updates from Screaming Frog’s newest version. The SEO spider tool can also create filter totals, auto pause on reaching memory, look for 5XX response retry links and give users the ability for request authentication. The newest release in February of 2013 fixed a few bugs, like domain matching and date formatting. However, Screaming Frog is constantly improving their software.

Check out some of our earlier blogs on how to use Screaming Frog and its SEO spider tool for SEO evaluation.

SEO Website Evaluation (4/5/2012) SEO Evaluation (8/23/2012)