Exclude status codes in Screaming Frog
-
I have a very large ecommerce site I'm trying to spider using screaming frog. Problem is I keep hanging even though I have turned off the high memory safeguard under configuration.
The site has approximately 190,000 pages according to the results of a Google site: command.
- The site architecture is almost completely flat. Limiting the search by depth is a possiblity, but it will take quite a bit of manual labor as there are literally hundreds of directories one level below the root.
- There are many, many duplicate pages. I've been able to exclude some of them from being crawled using the exclude configuration parameters.
- There are thousands of redirects. I haven't been able to exclude those from the spider b/c they don't have a distinguishing character string in their URLs.
Does anyone know how to exclude files using status codes? I know that would help.
If it helps, the site is kodylighting.com.
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.
-
Thanks for your help. It literally was just the fact that it had to be done before the crawl began and could not be changed during the crawl. Hopefully this is changed because sometimes during a crawl you find things you want to exclude that you may have not known of their existence before hand.
-
Are you sure it's just on Mac,have you tried on PC? Do you have any other rules in include or perhaps a conflicting rule in exclude? Try running a single exclude rule, also on another small site to test.
Also from support if failing on all fronts:
- Mac version, please make sure you have the most up to date version of the OS which will update Java.
- Please uninstall, then reinstall the spider ensuring you are using the latest version and try again.
To be sure - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOQ1DC0CBNs
-
does the exclude function work on mac. i have tried every possible way to exclude folders and have not been successful while running an analysis
-
That's exactly the problem, the redirects are disbursed randomly throughout the site. Although, and the job's still running, it now appears as though there's almost a 1-2-1 correlation between pages and redirects on the site.
I also heard from Dan Sharp via Twitter. He said "You can't, as we'd have to crawl a URL to see the status code You can right click and remove after though!"
Thanks again Michael. Your thoroughness and follow through is appreciated.
-
Took another look, also looked at documentation/online and don't see any way to exclude URLs from crawl based on response codes. As I see it you would only want to exclude on name or directory as response code is likely to be random throughout a site and impede a thorough crawl.
-
Thank you Michael.
You're right. I was on a 64 bit machine running a 32 bit verson of java. I updated it and the scan has been running for more than 24 hours now without hanging. So thank you.
If anyone else knows of a way to exclude files using status codes I'd still like to learn about it. So far the scan is showing me 20,000 redirected files which I'd just as soon not inventory.
-
I don't think you can filter out on response codes.
However, first I would ensure you are running the right version of Java if you are on a 64bit machine. The 32bit version functions but you cannot increase the memory allocation which is why you could be running into problems. Take a look at http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/ under Memory.
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
-
Unsolved Using NoIndex Tag instead of 410 Gone Code on Discontinued products?
Hello everyone, I am very new to SEO and I wanted to get some input & second opinions on a workaround I am planning to implement on our Shopify store. Any suggestions, thoughts, or insight you have are welcome & appreciated! For those who aren't aware, Shopify as a platform doesn't allow us to send a 410 Gone Code/Error under any circumstance. When you delete or archive a product/page, it becomes unavailable on the storefront. Unfortunately, the only thing Shopify natively allows me to do is set up a 301 redirect. So when we are forced to discontinue a product, customers currently get a 404 error when trying to go to that old URL. My planned workaround is to automatically detect when a product has been discontinued and add the NoIndex meta tag to the product page. The product page will stay up but be unavailable for purchase. I am also adjusting the LD+JSON to list the products availability as Discontinued instead of InStock/OutOfStock.
Technical SEO | | BakeryTech
Then I let the page sit for a few months so that crawlers have a chance to recrawl and remove the page from their indexes. I think that is how that works?
Once 3 or 6 months have passed, I plan on archiving the product followed by setting up a 301 redirect pointing to our internal search results page. The redirect will send the to search with a query aimed towards similar products. That should prevent people with open tabs, bookmarks and direct links to that page from receiving a 404 error. I do have Google Search Console setup and integrated with our site, but manually telling google to remove a page obviously only impacts their index. Will this work the way I think it will?
Will search engines remove the page from their indexes if I add the NoIndex meta tag after they have already been index?
Is there a better way I should implement this? P.S. For those wondering why I am not disallowing the page URL to the Robots.txt, Shopify won't allow me to call collection or product data from within the template that assembles the Robots.txt. So I can't automatically add product URLs to the list.0 -
301 Redirection, then 200 status for specific webpage
Hello everyone, Would like to seek your advice. Our company classified web pages currently set 301 redirection for product listing (expired) -> relevant category pages. At the same time, remove this webpage URL from the sitemap as well. In some cases, users reactivated the expired ads. In this case, the page will become status 200 again, also re-included in the sitemap again. Wondering if Search engines able to pick up and index the same webpage again? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | raysamu
Raymond0 -
422 vs 404 Status Codes
We work with an automotive industry platform provider and whenever a vehicle is removed from inventory, a 404 error is returned. Being that inventory moves so quickly, we have a host of 404 errors in search console. The fix that the platform provider proposed was to return a 422 status code vs a 404. I'm not familiar with how a 422 may impact our optimization efforts. Is this a good approach, since there is no scalable way to 301 redirect all of those dead inventory pages.
Technical SEO | | AfroSEO0 -
Can you use Screaming Frog to find all instances of relative or absolute linking?
My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
Do I have a problem with missing pages in Screaming Frog?
We have category pages and some of those pages have pagination due to us having additional items. Screaming Frog could not find the items that were after page 1. Is this a problem for Google? These item pages are still in the sitemap. I am sure they can find them to index them but does it hurt rankings at all.
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
No crawl code for pages of helpful links vs. no follow code on each link?
Our college website has many "owners" who want pages of "helpful links" resulting in a large number of outbound links. If we add code to the pages to prevent them from being crawled, will that be just as effective as making every individual link no follow?
Technical SEO | | LAJN0 -
Why are apostrophes and other characters still showing as code in my titles?
Hi, I have a WordPress-based site and overall everything is working well. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get apostrophes and other characters to display normally. Now, the problem isn't that they are displaying as code to normal visitors or up in the title bar, they are displaying as code to Google's bots as well as to SEOMOZ. Example: Normal visitor sees: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts Google and SEOMOZ see: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts I've played around with different ways of typing the title (not using character codes vs. using character codes) and nothing seems to work. Any help or explanation would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Function50