Spider Simulater. Does it work?

[polarking]

I tried spider simulator and it is showing a strange order the spider follows

http://www.example.com/giftcertificates.php
http://www.example.com/satisfaction-guaranteed/
http://www.example.com/

Is this accurate? I ran a test on several sites and the majority showed

www.examplesite.com as the first crawled

I would hate to think that the engines are putting more emphasis on my gift certificates than my homepage.

I read the post on here that the homepage should be first.

[polarking]

Thank You, CleverPhd I was able to locate a few of them 404s

[CleverPhD]

I would Rx Screaming Frog - it does good work and will tell you what the Spider sees.

As far as what it follows - that depends on what page you start on.  You can watch "live" in the ScreamingFrog spider as it runs through the sites and finds pages.

Overall, you just want to make sure it can find all your pages via a crawl and then focus on any errors found such as 404s or even 301s.

[polarking]

Thank you, there was a lot of custom work done on the site so I was concerned that something got goofed up. I tried screaming frog and it looks more accurate than the simulator

[KevinBudzynski]

Remember this is a simulation of crawling--not ranking (I believe spiders typically do find the home page first because it gets the most inbound links and etc).

I wouldn't worry about it as long as all the major the page shows up...