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-Agentin 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/delimitersreferences 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
-
User intent
Hello, For the keyword Normandy cycling, it seems according to the result that people are looking for the bike routes. My question : can i rank indicating my favorite bike routes (personal routes) or doIi need to stick to what is already considered as the best biking routes in Normandy, the tour de Manche, the veloscenic, the velo Francette and so forth ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
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 -
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
How important is the user experience for SEO in google's eyes?
So far I've gathered that backlinks are really king, however you can't get good backlinks without well written content that serves a purpose. As well you can't do a great job with that content and not keep a good user experience, since why would anyone want to backlink to content that can be helpful if you squint an eye and suffer a few scrolling cramps. So how would you rank user experience in the everlasting war of SEO for Google? With this in mind, why would using bootstrap resources pose a problem? I've seen it could add issue to pageload times, however seems minifying could easily solve that. I personally enjoy the use of Bootstrap since it's very easy on the eyes and can have real positive effects when a user looks at content on such a framework.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
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 -
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 -
Custom Error and page not found responses
When there is a 500 Internal Server Error, is it better to return an HTTP 500 response and custom error page from the requested URL, or is it better to return a 302 redirect? The redirect would send the browser to the custom error page, which would return the HTTP 500 result. We tell Google not to index or follow our error pages, so if Google sees an error at a URL, we don't necessarily want Google to think that the URL should be ignored. That's why the alternative would be to redirect to a custom error page with it's own URL. Similarly, what's the best approach if the response is a 404? Return HTTP 404 and custom 404 page from the requested URL, or redirect? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0