🙄 🕵🏾 🧚🏾 7 free analogues of Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider 📧 🧖🏻 🕘

Many SEO-specialists conduct technical audits of sites almost every day using one or another crawling software. In 90% of cases, this is the well-known Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Netpeak Spider . Both programs are paid, and their cost starts from £ 149 and $ 182 per year, respectively (we do not take into account the 500 free pages available in Screaming Frog, since this is not serious for more or less large projects). You must admit that not every freelancer SEO partner can afford to spend more than 10,000 rubles on the purchase of such software.

Without a doubt, both programs are decent, but I would like to be cheaper, and much cheaper. A better free)

Of course, in addition to Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider, there are many other paid and free similar programs for crawling sites, however, most of them either have weaker functionality, or their support and development has been discontinued for reasons unknown to us.

And if among the paid crawlers special questions “what to use” do not particularly arise (frog, netpeak, well, or a website auditor as a last resort), then free analogues are not known to everyone.

In this article we will try to highlight this issue.

Examples of alternative free SEO crawlers:

Xenu's Link Sleuth , the progenitor of web crawlers, has not been updated since 2010. It would be strange if someone else was using it now.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

WildShark is a very simple and free website parser from the eponymous advertising agency. Although WildShark SEO Spider has more features than Xenu's Link Sleuth, it is still functionally poor. There are practically no settings. Suitable for a quick assessment of the technical condition of the site, but is not suitable for serious audits.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Beam Us Up is a free site scanner for PCs that supports Windows, Linux and MacOS platforms, has quite informative reports and the ability to upload broken links, redirects, etc. to Excel. errors on the site. Of the minuses: only HTML parses, the project is no longer supported and is not developing.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Webbee is a free site or URL list crawler. The program has a wide range of parameters analyzed, displays the obtained statistics in graphical form, and there is integration with Google Analytics. Cons: visualization of data on graphs looks creepy, there could be more analyzed parameters, there is no way to filter data by arbitrary fields. The latest release was released in 2015.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

LinkChecker - the program is designed to check broken links in HTML-code and CSS files, hence its limited application. It works slowly, has not been updated for a long time. Do not waste time on it.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

IIS SEO Toolkit - Free Microsoft SEO Crawler! It has a sufficient set of functions for programs of this kind, the speed of crawling sites is also at a level. However, it only works on Windows 7-8. 10 is not supported. Apparently, further support for the program has been discontinued.

SiteAnalyzer - in terms of a set of functions, it is not inferior to paid analogues, that is, 80% of the program repeats the main functionality of Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider. At the same time, some functions, such as “Visualization of link links” on a graph, are not even found in most paid analogues. A young but noteworthy product.

As you can see from the above list, there are plenty of free alternatives for paid crawlers, but most of them have mediocre functionality, so in more detail I would like to dwell on only one of the proposed options - SiteAnalyzer.

The program is visually pretty close to the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, with 80% SiteAnalyzer repeating the basic functionality of the “frog” and has a Russian-language interface, so it will not be difficult for an experienced or novice seoshnik to deal with its work.

Quick access to projects

The main difference between SiteAnalyzer and Screaming Frog is the ability to store all sites in a single database in the form of a list of projects. Thus, there is no need to waste time saving the project to disk and then downloading data from the disk - just select the desired project from the list and after a few seconds we will get all its pages with detailed information on each of them.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Data visualization

The visualization of link links on a graph is intended to visually display the internal linking of the site, which gives an additional idea of the structure of the site and helps to identify hub pages and sections.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

It’s worth mentioning that there are no more web crawlers with the ability to visualize links on a graph all over the world than fingers on one hand, therefore the presence of this function in a free program is especially valuable.

PageRank Calculation

The PageRank tab is designed to calculate and display the numerical value of the internal PageRank for each page of the site (calculated based on the internal linking of all pages of the site).

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Thus, the SEO specialist will be able to analyze which pages receive the most internal links and, if necessary, adjust the linking of the site to redirect the link weight to more important pages.

Checking Page Indexing

The program has the ability to check indexing of pages in the Yandex search engine through Yandex XML.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Thus, after scanning the site, you can analyze what percentage of the pages of your site are in the Yandex index without using third-party services.

Dashboard

The Dashboard tab allows you to display a detailed report on the current site optimization on one page by displaying all errors found and indicating the degree of criticality.

Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

In addition to these data, the report contains an indication of a general indicator of the quality of site optimization, calculated on a 100-point scale relative to the current degree of its optimization. Additionally, it is possible to export the data of the Dashboard tab to a report in PDF format.

Conclusion

Today we examined the free options for technical audit programs and found out that, if you wish, you can find quite worthy replacements for paid tools and decently save the budget, having lost almost nothing as a site audit.