Web Spider Software
15 BEST Website Crawler Tools in 2021 [Free & Paid] – Guru99
A web crawler is an internet bot that browses WWW (World Wide Web). It is sometimes called as spiderbot or spider. The main purpose of it is to index web pages.
Web crawlers enable you to boost your SEO ranking visibility as well as conversions. It can find broken links, duplicate content, missing page titles, and recognize major problems involved in SEO. There is a vast range of web crawler tools that are designed to effectively crawl data from any website URLs. These apps help you to improve website structure to make it understandable by search engines and improve rankings.
Following is a handpicked list of Top Web Crawler with their popular features and website links to download web crawler apps. The list contains both open source(free) and commercial(paid) software.
Best Web Crawler Tools & Software
1) Visualping
Visualping is a website monitoring tool that crawls the web for changes. Use Visualping in your SEO strategy to monitor changes on SERPs, competitor landing pages and Google algorithm updates.
Features:
You can automatically monitor parts of a webpage or entire pages in bulk.
Track your competitors and clients keyword edits on title, meta, H1 and other tags.
Receive notifications via email, Slack, Teams or Discord.
Monitor visual, text and code changes.
Provide complete SEO reports and change audits to your clients.
Use other SEO tools to collect data and Visualping to alert you of the changes.
2) Semrush
Semrush is a website crawler tool that analyzed pages & structure of your website in order to identify technical SEO issues. Fixing these issues helps to improve your search performance. Apart from this service, it also offers tools for SEO, market research, SMM and advertising.
It will test for Metadata, HTTP/HTTPS, Directives, Status codes, Duplicate content, Page response time, Internal linking, Image sizes, Structured data, Site structure, etc
Provides easy to use interface
It helps you to analyze log file.
This application has a dashboard that enables you to view website issues with ease.
Enables you to audit your website without any hassle.
3)
is a website SEO checker that helps you to improve SEO ratings. It provides on-page SEO audit report that can be sent to clients.
This web crawler tool can scan internal and external links on your website.
It helps you to test the speed of your site.
You can visualize the structure of a web page with ease.
also allows you to check indexing issues on landings pages.
It enables you to prevent hackers from attack.
4) ContentKing
ContentKing is an app that enables you to perform real-time SEO monitoring and auditing. This application can be used without installing any software.
It helps you to structure your site with segments.
You can monitor your website changes.
It offers various APIs like Google Search Console and Analytics.
It provides a user-friendly dashboard.
It helps you to collaborate with your clients or colleagues.
5) Link-Assistant
Link-Assistant is a website crawler tool that provides website analysis and optimization facilities. It helps you to make your site works seamlessly. This application enables you to find out the most visited pages of your website.
Provides site optimization reports that help you to boost your business productivity.
You can customize this tool according to your desire.
Easy to configure your site settings.
Helps you to make your website search engine friendly.
It can optimize a site in any language.
6) Hexometer
Hexometer is a web crawling tool that can monitor your website performance. It enables you to share tasks and issues with your team members.
It can check the security problems of your website.
Offers intuitive dashboard.
This application can perform white label SEO.
Hexometer can optimize for SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
This software can be integrated with Telegram, Slack, Chrome, Gmail, etc.
It helps you to keep track of your website changes.
7) Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that enables you to crawl the URLs. It is one of the best web crawler which helps you to analyze and audit technical and onsite SEO. You can use this tool to crawl upto 500 URLs for free.
It instantly finds broken links and server errors.
This free web crawler tool helps you to analyze page titles and metadata.
You can update and collect data from a web page using XPath (XML Path Language).
Screaming Frog helps you to find duplicate content.
You can generate XML Sitemaps (a list of your website’s URLs).
This list website crawler allows you to integrate with Google Analytics, GSC (Google Search Console) & PSI (PageSpeed Insights).
Link:
8) Deepcrawl
DeepCrawl is a cloud-based tool that helps you to read and crawl your website content. It enables you to understand and monitor the technical issues of the website to improve SEO performance.
It supports multi-domain monitoring.
This online web crawler provides customized dashboards.
This website crawler tool helps you to index and discover your web pages.
Deepcrawl enables you to increase the loading speed of your website.
This app provides a ranking, traffic, and summary data to view the performance of the website.
9) WildShark SEO Spider Tool
WildShark SEO Spider Tool is a URL crawling app that helps you to identify pages with duplicate description tags. You can use it to find missing duplicate titles.
Highlight missing H3 tags, title tags, and ALT tags.
It helps you to improve on-page SEO performance.
You can optimize your web page titles and descriptions.
WildShark SEO Spider tool enables you to boost website conversion rates.
This tool also looks for missing alt tags.
10) Scraper
Scraper is a chrome extension that helps you to perform online research and get data into CSV file quickly. This tool enables you to copy data to the clipboard as a tab-separated value.
It can fix the issue with spreadsheet titles ending.
This website crawler tool can capture rows containing TDs (Tabular Data Stream).
Scraper is easy to use tool for the people who are comfortable with XPath query language.
11) Visual SEO Studio
Visual SEO Studio is a web crawling tool that crawls exactly like a search spider. It provides a suite to inspect your website quickly.
It helps you to audit a backlink profile.
This web crawler freeware tool can also crawl the website having AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
Visual SEO Studio can audit XML Sitemaps by web content.
12)
is a tool that helps you to capture data from the search engine and e-commerce website. It provides flexible web data collection features.
Allows you to customize according to your business needs.
This web crawler software can effectively handle all captchas.
This tool can fetch data from complex sites.
is easy to scale without managing IPS (Intrusion Prevention System).
13) 80legs
80legs is a crawling web service that enables you to create and run web crawls through SaaS. It is one of the best Free online Web Crawler tools which consists of numerous server that allows you to access the site from different IP addresses.
It helps you to design and run custom web crawls.
This tool enables you to monitor trends online.
You can build your own templates.
Automatically control the crawling speed according to website traffic.
80legs enables you to download results to the local environment or computer.
You can crawl the website just by entering a URL.
14) Dyno Mapper
DYNO Mapper is a web-based crawling software. It helps you to create an interactive visual site map that displays the hierarchy.
This online Website Crawler tool can track the website from tablets, mobile devices, and desktop.
This web crawler software helps you to understand the weakness of your website or application.
Dyno Mapper enables you to crawl private pages of password-protected websites.
You can track keyword results for local and international keyword rankings.
It enables developers to develop search engine friendly websites.
15) Oncrawl
Oncrawl is a simple app that analyzes your website and finds all the factors that block the indexation of your web pages. It helps you to find SEO issues in less amount of time.
You can import HTML, content, and architecture to crawl pages of your website.
This online web crawler can detect duplicate content on any website.
Oncrawl can crawl the website with JavaScript code.
This tool can handle, a file that tells search engines which pages on your site to crawl.
You can choose two crawls to compare and measures the effect of new policies on your website.
It can monitor website performance.
16) Cocoscan
Cocoscan is a software product that analyzes your website and finds the factor that blocks the indexation of your web pages. This crawler tool can find the primary SEO related issues in less time.
It can identify important keyword density.
Cocoscan can check for duplicate written content in any website.
This web crawler app can analyze your website and make your website searchable by a search engine.
This lists crawler app provides you a list of pages with issues that could affect your website.
You can increase Google ranking effortlessly.
This web crawler online offers real time visual image of a responsive website.
17) HTTrack
HTTrack is an open-source web crawler that allows users to download websites from the internet to a local system. It is one of the best web spidering tools that helps you to build a structure of your website.
This site crawler tool uses web crawlers to download website.
This program provides two versions command line and GUI.
HTTrack follows the links which are generated with JavaScript.
18) webharvy
Webharvy is a website crawling tool that helps you to extract HTML, images, text, and URLs from the site. It automatically finds patterns of data occurring in a web page.
This free website crawler can handle form submission, login, etc.
You can extract data from more than one page, keywords, and categories.
Webharvy has built-in VPN (Virtual Private Network) support.
It can detect the pattern of data in web pages.
You can save extracted data in numerous formats.
Crawling multiple pages is possible.
It helps you to run JavaScript code in the browser.
Link: FAQs
❓ What is a Web Crawler?
A Web Crawler is an Internet bot that browses through WWW (World Wide Web), downloads and indexes content. It is widely used to learn each webpage on the web to retrieve information. It is sometimes called a spider bot or spider. The main purpose of it is to index web pages.
❗ What is a Web Crawler used for?
A Web crawler is used to boost SEO ranking, visibility as well as conversions. It is also used to find broken links, duplicate content, missing page titles, and recognize major problems involved in SEO. Web crawler tools are designed to effectively crawl data from any website URLs. These apps help you to improve website structure to make it understandable by search engines and improve rankings.
Which are the best Website Crawler tools?
Following are some of the best website crawler tools:
Visualping
Semrush
ContentKing
Link-Assistant
Hexometer
Screaming Frog
How to choose the best Website Crawler?
You should consider the following factors while choosing the best website crawler:
Easy to use User Interface
Features offered
A web crawler must detect file and sitemap easily
It should find broken pages and links with ease
It must identify redirect issues, and HTTP/ HTTPS issues
A web crawler should be able to connect with Google Analytics with ease
It must detect mobile elements
It should support multiple file formats
A web crawler must support multiple devices
What Is a Web Crawler and How Does It Work | LITSLINK Blog
Let’s be painfully honest, when your business is not represented on the Internet, it is non-existent to the world. Moreover, if you don’t have a website, you are losing an ample opportunity to attract more quality leads. Any business from a corporate giant like Amazon to a one-person company is striving to have a website and content that appeal to their audiences. Discovering you and your company online does not stop there. Behind websites, there is a whole “invisible to the human eye” world where web crawlers play an important role. Contents What Is a Web Crawler and Indexing? How Does a Web Search Work? How Does a Web Crawler Work? What Are the Main Web Crawler Types? What Are Examples of Web Crawlers? What Is a Googlebot? Web Crawler vs Web Scraper — What Is the Difference? Custom Web Crawler — What Is It? Wrapping Up What Is a Web Crawler And Indexing? Let’s start with a web crawler definition: A web crawler (also known as a web spider, spider bot, web bot, or simply a crawler) is a computer software program that is used by a search engine to index web pages and content across the World Wide Web. Indexing is quite an essential process as it helps users find relevant queries within seconds. The search indexing can be compared to the book indexing. For instance, if you open last pages of a textbook, you will find an index with a list of queries in alphabetical order and pages where they are mentioned in the textbook. The same principle underlines the search index, but instead of page numbering, a search engine shows you some links where you can look for answers to your inquiry. The significant difference between the search and book indices is that the former is dynamic, therefore, it can be changed, and the latter is always static. How Does a Web Search Work? Before plunging into the details of how a crawler robot works, let’s see how the whole search process is executed before you get an answer to your search query. For instance, if you type “What is the distance between Earth and Moon” and hit enter, a search engine will show you a list of relevant pages. Usually, it takes three major steps to provide users with the required information to their searches: A web spider crawls content on websites It builds an index for a search engine Search algorithms rank the most relevant pages Also, one needs to bear in mind two essential points: You do not do your searches in real-time as it is impossible There are plenty of websites on the World Wide Web, and many more are being created even now when you are reading this article. That is why it could take eons for a search engine to come up with a list of pages that would be relevant to your query. To speed up the process of searching, a search engine crawls the pages before showing them to the world. You do not do your searches in the World Wide Web Indeed, you do not perform searches in the World Wide Web but in a search index and this is when a web crawler enters the battlefield. Reap the profits for your business with our top web app development service! Contact Us Now! How Does a Web Crawler Work? There are many search engines out there − Google, Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, and many others. Each of them uses its spider bot to index pages. They start their crawling process from the most popular websites. Their primary purpose of web bots is to convey the gist of what each page content is all about. Thus, web spiders seek words on these pages and then build a practical list of these words that will be used by a search engine next time when you want to find information about your query. All pages on the Internet are connected by hyperlinks, so site spiders can discover those links and follow them to the next pages. Web bots only stop when they locate all content and connected websites. Then they send the recorded information a search index, which is stored on servers around the globe. The whole process resembles a real-life spider web where everything is intertwined. Crawling does not stop immediately once pages have been indexed. Search engines periodically use web spiders to see if any changes have been made to pages. If there is a change, the index of a search engine will be updated accordingly. What Are the Main Web Crawler Types? Web crawlers are not limited to search engine spiders. There are other types of web crawling out there. Email crawling Email crawling is especially useful in outbound lead generation as this type of crawling helps extract email addresses. It is worth mentioning that this kind of crawling is illegal as it violates personal privacy and can’t be used without user permission. News crawling With the advent of the Internet, news from all over the world can be spread rapidly around the Web, and to extract data from various websites can be quite unmanageable. There are many web crawlers that can cope with this task. Such crawlers are able to retrieve data from new, old, and archived news content and read RSS feeds. They extract the following information: date of publishing, the author’s name, headlines, lead paragraphs, main text, and publishing language. Image crawling As the name implies, this type of crawling is applied to images. The Internet is full of visual representations. Thus, such bots help people find relevant pictures in a plethora of images across the Web. Social media crawling Social media crawling is quite an interesting matter as not all social media platforms allow to be crawled. You should also bear in mind that such type of crawling can be illegal if it violates data privacy compliance. Still, there are many social media platform providers which are fine with crawling. For instance, Pinterest and Twitter allow spider bots to scan their pages if they are not user-sensitive and do not disclose any personal information. Facebook, LinkedIn are strict regarding this matter. Video crawling Sometimes it is much easier to watch a video than read a lot of content. If you decide to embed Youtube, Soundcloud, Vimeo, or any other video content into your website, it can be indexed by some web crawlers. What Are Examples of Web Crawlers? A lot of search engines use their own search bots. For instance, the most common web crawlers examples are: Alexabot Amazon web crawler Alexabot is used for web content identification and backlink discovery. If you want to keep some of your information private, you can exclude Alexabot from crawling your website. Yahoo! Slurp Bot Yahoo crawler Yahoo! Slurp Bot is used for indexing and scraping of web pages to enhance personalized content for users. Bingbot Bingbot is one of the most popular web spiders powered by Microsoft. It helps a search engine, Bing, to create the most relevant index for its users. DuckDuck Bot DuckDuckGo is probably one of the most popular search engines that does not track your history and follow you on whatever sites you are visiting. Its DuckDuck Bot web crawler helps to find the most relevant and best results that will satisfy a user’s needs. Facebook External Hit Facebook also has its crawler. For example, when a Facebook user wants to share a link to an external content page with another person, the crawler scrapes the HTML code of the page and provides both of them with the title, a tag of the video or images of the content. Baiduspider This crawler is operated by the dominant Chinese search engine − Baidu. Like any other bot, it travels through a variety of web pages and looks for hyperlinks to index content for the engine. Exabot French search engine Exalead uses Exabot for indexation of content so that it could be included in the engine’s index. Yandex Bot This bot belongs to the largest Russian search engine Yandex. You can block it from indexing your content if you are not planning to conduct business there. What Is a Googlebot? As it was stated above, almost all search engines have their spider bots, and Google is no exception. Googlebot is a google crawler powered by the most popular search engine in the world, which is used for indexing content for this engine. As Hubspot, a renowned CRM vendor, states in its blog, Google has more than 92. 42% of the search market share, and its mobile traffic is over 86%. So, if you want to make the most out of the search engine for your business, find out more information on its web spider so that your future customers can discover your content thanks to Google. Googlebot can be of two types — a desktop bot and a mobile app crawlers, which simulate the user on these devices. It uses the same crawling principle as any other web spider, like following links and scanning content available on websites. The process is also fully automated and can be recurrent, meaning that it can visit the same page several times at non-regular intervals. If you are ready to publish content, it will take days for the Google crawler to index it. If you are the owner of the website, you can manually speed the process by submitting an indexing request through Fetch as Google or updating your website’s sitemap. You can also use (or The Robots Exclusion Protocol) for “giving instructions” to a spider bot, including Googlebot. There you can allow or disallow crawlers to visit certain pages of your website. However, keep in mind that this file can be easily accessed by third parties. They will see what parts of the site you restricted from indexing. Web Crawler vs Web Scraper — What Is the Difference? A lot of people use web crawlers and web scrapers interchangeably. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between these two. If the former deals mostly with metadata of content, like tags, headlines, keywords, and other things, the latter “steals” content from a website to be posted on someone else’s online resource. A web scraper also “hunts” for specific data. For instance, if you need to extract information from a website where there is information such as stock market trends, Bitcoin prices, or any other, you can retrieve data from these websites by using a web scraping bot. If you crawl your website, and you want to submit your content for indexing, or have an intention for other people to find it — it is perfectly legal, otherwise scraping of other people’s and companies’ websites is against the law. Custom Web Crawler — What Is It? A custom web crawler is a bot that is used to cover a specific need. You can build your spider bot to cover any task that needs to be resolved. For instance, if you are an entrepreneur or marketer or any other professional who deals with content, you can make it easier for your customers and users to find the information they want on your website. You can create a variety of web bots for various purposes. If you do not have any practical experience in building your custom web crawler, you can always contact a software development service provider that can help you with it. Wrapping Up Website crawlers are an integral part of any major search engine that are used for indexing and discovering content. Many search engine companies have their bots, for instance, Googlebot is powered by the corporate giant Google. Apart from that, there are multiple types of crawling that are utilized to cover specific needs, like video, image, or social media crawling. Taking into account what spider bots can do, they are highly essential and beneficial for your business because web crawlers reveal you and your company to the world and can bring in new users and customers. If you are looking to create a custom web crawler, contact LITSLINK, an experienced web development services provider, for more information.
How to Crawl a Website with DeepCrawl
Running frequent and targeted crawls of your website is a key part of improving it’s technical health and improving rankings in organic search. In this guide, you’ll learn how to a crawl a website efficiently and effectively with DeepCrawl. The six steps to crawling a website include:
Configuring the URL sources
Understanding the domain structure
Running a test crawl
Adding crawl restrictions
Testing your changes
Running your crawl
Step 1: Configuring the URL sources
There are six types of URL sources you can include in your DeepCrawl projects.
Including each one strategically, is the key to an efficient, and comprehensive crawl:
Web crawl: Crawl only the site by following its links to deeper levels.
Sitemaps: Crawl a set of sitemaps, and the URLs in those sitemaps. Links on these pages will not be followed or crawled.
Analytics: Upload analytics source data, and crawl the URLs, to discover additional landing pages on your site which may not be linked. The analytics data will be available in various reports.
Backlinks: Upload backlink source data, and crawl the URLs, to discover additional URLs with backlinks on your site. The backlink data will be available in various reports.
URL lists: Crawl a fixed list of URLs. Links on these pages will not be followed or crawled.
Log files: Upload log file summary data from log file analyser tools, such as Splunk and
Ideally, a website should be crawled in full (including every linked URL on the site). However, very large websites, or sites with many architectural problems, may not be able to be fully crawled immediately. It may be necessary to restrict the crawl to certain sections of the site, or limit specific URL patterns (we’ll cover how to do this below).
Step 2: Understanding the Domain Structure
Before starting a crawl, it’s a good idea to get a better understanding of your site’s domain structure:
Check the www/non-www and / configuration of the domain when you add the domain.
Identify whether the site is using sub-domains.
If you are not sure about sub-domains, check the DeepCrawl “Crawl Subdomains” option and they will automatically be discovered if they are linked.
Step 3: Running a Test Crawl
Start with a small “Web Crawl, ” to look for signs that the site is uncrawlable.
Before starting the crawl, ensure that you have set the “Crawl Limit” to a low quantity. This will make your first checks more efficient, as you won’t have to wait very long to see the results.
Problems to watch for include:
A high number of URLs returning error codes, such as 401 access denied
URLs returned that are not of the correct subdomain – check that the base domain is correct under “Project Settings”.
Very low number of URLs found.
A large number of failed URLs (502, 504, etc).
A large number of canonicalized URLs.
A large number of duplicate pages.
A significant increase in the number of pages found at each level.
To save time, and check for obvious problems immediately, download the URLs during the crawl:
Step 4: Adding Crawl Restrictions
Next, reduce the size of the crawl by identifying anything that can be excluded. Adding restrictions ensures you are not wasting time (or credits) crawling URLs that are not important to you. All the following restrictions can be added within the “Advanced Settings” tab.
Remove Parameters
If you have excluded any parameters from search engine crawls with URL parameter tools like Google Search Console, enter these in the “Remove Parameters” field under “Advanced Settings. ”
Add Custom Settings
DeepCrawl’s “Robots Overwrite” feature allows you to identify additional URLs that can be excluded using a custom file – allowing you to test the impact of pushing a new file to a live environment.
Upload the alternative version of your robots file under “Advanced Settings” and select “Use Robots Override” when starting the crawl:
Filter URLs and URL Paths
Use the “Included/Excluded” URL fields under “Advanced Settings” to limit the crawl to specific areas of interest.
Add Crawl Limits for Groups of Pages
Use the “Page Grouping” feature, under “Advanced Settings, ” to restrict the number of URLs crawled for groups of pages based on their URL patterns.
Here, you can add a name.
In the “Page URL Match” column you can add a regular expression.
Add a maximum number of URLs to crawl in the “Crawl Limit” column.
URLs matching the designated path are counted. When the limits have been reached, all further matching URLs go into the “Page Group Restrictions” report and are not crawled.
Step 5: Testing Your Changes
Run test “Web Crawls” to ensure your configuration is correct and you’re ready to run a full crawl.
Step 6: Running your Crawl
Ensure you’ve increased the “Crawl Limit” before running a more in-depth crawl.
Consider running a crawl with as many URL sources as possible, to supplement your linked URLs with XML Sitemap and Google Analytics, and other data.
If you have specified a subdomain of www within the “Base Domain” setting, subdomains such as blog or default, will not be crawled.
To include subdomains select “Crawl Subdomains” within the “Project Settings” tab.
Set “Scheduling” for your crawls and track your progress.
Handy Tips
Settings for Specific Requirements
If you have a test/sandbox site you can run a “Comparison Crawl” by adding your test site domain and authentication details in “Advanced Settings. ”
For more about the Test vs Live feature, check out our guide to Comparing a Test Website to a Live Website.
To crawl an AJAX-style website, with an escaped fragment solution, use the “URL Rewrite” function to modify all linked URLs to the escaped fragment format.
Read more about our testing features – Testing Development Changes Before Putting Them Live.
Changing Crawl Rate
Watch for performance issues caused by the crawler while running a crawl.
If you see connection errors, or multiple 502/503 type errors, you may need to reduce the crawl rate under “Advanced Settings. ”
If you have a robust hosting solution, you may be able to crawl the site at a faster rate.
The crawl rate can be increased at times when the site load is reduced – 4 a. m. for example.
Head to “Advanced Settings” > “Crawl Rate” > “Add Rate Restriction. ”
Analyze Outbound Links
Sites with a large quantity of external links, may want to ensure that users are not directed to dead links.
To check this, select “Crawl External Links” under “Project Settings, ” adding an HTTP status code next to external links within your report.
Read more on outbound link audits to learn about analyzing and cleaning up external links.
Change User Agent
See your site through a variety of crawlers’ eyes (Facebook/Bingbot etc. ) by changing the user agent in “Advanced Settings. ”
Add a custom user agent to determine how your website responds.
After The Crawl
Reset your “Project Settings” after the crawl, so you can continue to crawl with ‘real-world’ settings applied.
Remember, the more you experiment and crawl, the closer you get to becoming an expert crawler.
Start your journey with DeepCrawl
If you’re interested in running a crawl with DeepCrawl, discover our range of flexible plans or if you want to find out more about our platform simply drop us a message and we’ll get back to you asap.
Author
Sam Marsden
Sam Marsden is Deepcrawl’s Former SEO & Content Manager. Sam speaks regularly at marketing conferences, like SMX and BrightonSEO, and is a contributor to industry publications such as Search Engine Journal and State of Digital.
Frequently Asked Questions about web spider software
What is Web crawling software?
A web crawler (also known as a web spider, spider bot, web bot, or simply a crawler) is a computer software program that is used by a search engine to index web pages and content across the World Wide Web. Indexing is quite an essential process as it helps users find relevant queries within seconds.Sep 26, 2019
How do I web crawl a website?
The six steps to crawling a website include:Configuring the URL sources.Understanding the domain structure.Running a test crawl.Adding crawl restrictions.Testing your changes.Running your crawl.
What are spiders in software?
A “software spider” is an unmanned program operated by a search engine that surfs the Web just like you would. … The software spider often reads and then indexes the entire text of each Web site it visits into the main database of the search engine it is working for.Apr 24, 2000
