Setting A Custom User Agent in Screaming Frog
-
Hi all,
Probably a dumb question, but I wanted to make sure I get this right.
How do we set a custom user agent in Screaming Frog? I know its in the configuration settings, but what do I have to do to create a custom user agent specifically for a website?
Thanks much!
- Malika
-
Setting a custom user agent determines things like HTTP/2 so there can be a big difference if you change it to something that might not take advantage of something like HTTP/2
Apparently, it is coming to Pingdom very soon just like it is to Googlebot
http://royal.pingdom.com/2015/06/11/http2-new-protocol/
This Is an excellent example of a user agent's ability to modify the way your site is crawled as well as how efficient it is.
https://www.keycdn.com/blog/https-performance-overhead/
It is important to note that we didn’t use Pingdom in any of our tests because they use Chrome 39, which doesn’t support the new HTTP/2 protocol. HTTP/2 in Chrome isn’t supported until Chrome 43. You can tell this by looking at the
User-Agent
in the request headers of your test results.Pingdom user-agent
Note: WebPageTest uses Chrome 47 which does support HTTP/2.
Hope that clears things up,
Tom
-
Hi Malika,
Think about screaming frog and what it has to detect in order to do that correctly it needs the correct user agent syntax for it will not be able to make a crawl that would satisfy people.
Using a proper syntax for a user agent is essential and I have tried to be non-technical in this explanation I hope it works.
the reason screaming frog needs the user agent because the user-agent was added to HTTP to help web application developers deliver a better user experience. By respecting the syntax and semantics of the header, we make it easier and faster for header parsers to extract useful information from the headers that we can then act on.
Browser vendors are motivated to make web sites work no matter what specification violations are made. When the developers building web applications don’t care about following the rules, the browser vendors work to accommodate that. It is only by us application developers developing a healthy respect
When the developers building web applications don’t care about following the rules, the browser vendors work to accommodate that. It is only by us application developers developing a healthy respect
It is only by us application developers developing a healthy respect for the standards of the web, that the browser vendors will be able to start tightening up their codebase knowing that they don’t need to account for non-conformances.
For client libraries that do not enforce the syntax rules, you run the risk of using invalid characters that many server side frameworks will not detect. It is possible that only certain users, in particular, environments would identify the syntax violation. This can lead to difficult to track down bugs.
I hope this is a good explanation I've tried to keep it very to the point.
Respectfully,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas,
would you have a simpler tutorial for me to understand? I am struggling a bit.
Thanks heaps in advance
-
I think I want something that is dumbed down to my level for me to understand. The above tutorials are great but not being a full time coder, I get lost while reading those.
-
Hi Matt,
I havent had a luck with this one yet.
-
Hi Malika! How'd it go? Did everything work out?
-
happy I could be of help let me know if there's any issue and I will try to be of help with it. All the best
-
Hi Thomas,
That's a lot of useful information there. I will have a go on it and let you know how it went.
Thanks heaps!
-
please let me know if I did not answer the question or you have any other questions
-
this gives you a very clear breakdown of user agents and their set of syntax rules. The following is valid example of user-agent that is full of special characters,
read this please http://www.bizcoder.com/the-much-maligned-user-agent-header
user-agent: foo&bar-product!/1.0a$*+ (a;comment,full=of/delimiters
references but you want to pay attention to the first URL
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0 |
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15069533/http-request-header-useragent-variable
-
if you formatted it correctly see below
User-Agent = product *( RWS ( product / comment ) )
and it was received by your headers yes you could fill in the blanks and test it.
https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/webviews-and-user-agent-strings
http://mobiforge.com/news-comment/standards-and-browser-compatibility
-
No, you Cannot just put anything in there. The site has to recognize it and ask why you are doing this?
I have listed how to build and already built in addition to what your browser will create by using useragentstring.com
Must be formatted correctly and have it work with a header it is not as easy as it sometimes seems but not that hard either.
You can make & use this to make your own from your Mac or PC
http://www.useragentstring.com/
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2747.0 Safari/537.36
how to build a user agent
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Gecko_user_agent_string_reference
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Setting_HTTP_request_headers
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503(VS.85).aspx
Lists of user agents
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503(v=vs.85).aspx
-
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for responding, much appreciated!
Does that mean, if I type in something like -
HTTP request user agent -
Crawler access V2
&
Robots user agent
Crawler access V2
This will work too?
-
To crawl using a different user agent, select ‘User Agent’ in the ‘Configuration’ menu, then select a search bot from the drop-down or type in your desired user agent strings.
http://i.imgur.com/qPbmxnk.png
&
Video http://cl.ly/gH7p/Screen Recording 2016-05-25 at 08.27 PM.mov
Or
Also see
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/#user-agent
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/faq/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best way to set up URL structure for reviews off of PDP pages.
We are adding existing customer reviews to Product Detail Pages pages. There are about 300 reviews per product so we're going to have to paginate reviews off of the PDP page. I'm wondering what the best url structure for reviews pages is to get the most seo benefit. For example, would it be something like this? site.com/category/product/reviews/page-1 or something that used parameters, such as: site.com/reviews?product=a Also, what is the best way to show that the internal link on the PDP page to "All Reviews" is a higher priority link than the other links on the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katseo10 -
Set Robots.txt file to crawl my website at specific times
Our website provider has stated that they can only 'lift' their block on our website in order for it to be crawled as specific times. Is there any way to amend a robots.txt to ensure that it crawls our website at a specific time of day/night in order to coincide with the block being lifted? Many Thanks, Charlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharleneKennedy120 -
YOAST SEO: How to set rel=cannonical tags to the original article post
Hi Mozers, Can anyone tell me how to set the rel="canonical tags via SEO YOAST? I have an article posted on my blog that was published first on another blog and i need to reference this entry somehow, I have been told to use rel="canonical - if so I would appreciate some insight on how to do this exactly! Thanks very much in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Would spiders successfully crawl a page with two distinct sets of content?
Hello all and thank you in advance for the help. I have a coffee company that sell both retail and wholesale products. These are typically the same product, just at different prices. We are planning on having a pop up for users to help them self identify upon their first visit asking if they are retail or wholesale clients. So if someone clicks retail, the cookie will show them retail pricing throughout the site and vice versa for those that identify themselves as wholesale. I can talk to our programmer to find out how he actually plans on doing this from a technical standpoint if it would be of assistance. My question is, how will a spider crawl this site? I am assuming (probably incorrectly) that whatever the "default" selection is (for example, right now now people see retail pricing and then opt into wholesale) will be the information/pricing that they index. So long story short, how would a spider crawl a page that has two sets of distinct pricing information displayed based on user self identification? Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
"nocontent" class use for Google Custom Search: SEO Ramifications?
Hi all, Have a client that uses Google Custom Search tool which is crawling, indexing and returning millions of irrelevant results for keywords that are on every page of the site. IT/Web dev. team is considering adding a class attribute to prohibit Google Custom Search from indexing bolierplate content regions. Here's the link to Google's custom search help page: http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2364585 "...If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the nocontent class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine. (We'll still follow and crawl any links contained in the text marked nocontent.) To use the nocontent class attribute, include the boilerplate content in a tag (for example, span or div) like this: Google Custom Search also notes:"Using nocontent won't impact your site's performance in Google Web Search, or our crawling of your site, in any way. We'll continue to follow any links in tagged content; we just won't use keywords to calculate ranking for your Custom Search engine."Just want to confirm if anyone can forsee any SEO implications the use of this div could create? Anyone have experience with this?Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MRM-McCANN0