Overview
The Screamingfrog SEO Spider Tool is an interesting new SEO tool that enables you to check out your website as it would be seen through the eyes of a search engine spider. While this can help you build up your site, is it really worth downloading and using, or is it another useless SEO tool in the sea of so many other similar programs? Read on and find out.
The Good
The Screamingfrog SEO Spider Tool is a free program unless you want to pay for the developer’s license or the extended version. While the free version does have some limitations, it should be strong enough for small to medium websites, and it lets you try out the program for as long as you like before buying it.
Overwhelmingly, most SEO tools only work on Windows, leaving very few tools for Mac users. Screamingfrog breaks this mold by making their SEO Spider Tool available for both Windows and Mac.
When tested, this software is able to find backlinks and sections of a website that are typically very hard to find for other comparable tools, and it does not take too long to load all the elements of a website. Not only that, but the information loaded seemed rather accurate.
After loading all of the elements of a website, you are able to mix and match elements and then export them into an Excel document for further viewing or analyzing. Not only that, but the information this tool can dig up is very exhaustive, so even experienced SEO auditors should be able to make use of this program.
The Bad
While loading speeds are pretty good, large pages do take a long time to load. If you need a fast program, this may not satisfy your needs as you may have to wait an hour for very large websites to properly finish.
The information presented is not very newbie-friendly. Thankfully it comes with a user guide to help teach you how to use the information, but even still people new to SEO may find this program confusing.
Most SEO tools report on backlink numbers, PaegRank and other similar factors. This program shows the amount of backlinks goes to a website, but it does not show you the total number; they are just laid out in a large list. PageRank and other similar factors do not show up, so this tool may not be useful for people outside of auditing a website for search engine crawling issues. Otherwise there is not really anything bad about this free SEO Software.
Review and Rating
This program gets a 4/5, even though most new SEO people will not get much use out of it. Unlike so many other free programs, this one offers very powerful features, and it has both Mac and Windows support, a rarity among SEO programs.
What really pushes the rating up so high is the breadth of information this program can dig up. Very few similar programs can dig up so much accurate information, making this program well suited for SEO auditors and anyone seeking out crawling issues.
While there are a few problems with how the program works, it is still a very good program. Give it a try, just be sure you read the user manual first so you don’t get confused by the presented information.