Screaming Frog Seo - Spider Review
But the real horror was in the "URL" tab. Maya sorted by "Response Time (ms)." A column she’d never even seen in her pretty cloud tools.
"The Frog?"
"You're using toys," Leo said, nodding at her browser tab. "When the patient is bleeding internally, you don't need a Fitbit. You need a scalpel. You need the Frog."
1,204 broken pages. Old product lines, mistyped category links, and a whole section of the blog that had been deleted but never 301-redirected. screaming frog seo spider review
She typed in vintagevibe.com and hit "Start."
And sometimes, in the quiet of her home office, Maya would hit "Start" on a 100,000-URL crawl just to hear the faint whir of her laptop fan—the sound of a digital frog hopping through the dark corners of the web, carrying a lantern and a very loud megaphone.
But today, her comfort zone was a smoldering crater. But the real horror was in the "URL" tab
Leo typed a URL: screamingfrog.co.uk . "Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Download it. It's ugly. It sounds like a joke. But it will show you things about your website that your website doesn't even know about itself."
3,500 pages with duplicate titles. 800 pages with missing titles. 200 pages with titles over 70 characters that would get cut off in search results.
Her largest client, a sprawling e-commerce site called Vintage Vibe (10,000+ products, 15,000 category pages, and a blog that hadn't been updated since the Obama administration), had just been hit by a core update. Organic traffic had plummeted 40% overnight. The C-suite was sending emails with subject lines like "URGENT" and "PLEASE ADVISE." "When the patient is bleeding internally, you don't
"Google thinks your site is a labyrinth," she said. "The Frog helped me see it."
847 temporary redirects (302s) where there should have been permanent ones (301s), diluting link equity like a leaky bucket.
Oh, no.
The Frog had analyzed every single image on the site. It showed her, in a neat, sortable table, that 60% of her product images had file names like IMG_4421.jpg instead of red-cable-knit-sweater.jpg . Worse, 40% had no alt text at all. But the killer was the file size column. Her hero images were 5MB each. Uncompressed. Massive.