Screaming Frog Announces SEO Spider Update (Version 16.0)

When Google retweets about an SEO tool...it’s probably worth paying attention.
SIA Team
September 23, 2021

If you have intermediate or advanced knowledge of SEO, you’ve probably heard of the tool known as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is the namesake of it’s brand, Screaming Frog.

It’s a software that’s been around for years, and due to it’s many, many functions, there are numerous webmasters and SEO professionals who use it for a wide variety of reasons.

One function I’ve used it for is to try to find errors on one of my sites. I used it to find broken links. 

Google recently retweeted this:

The page that announces version 16.0 has a description of each of the many improvements that users can look forward to. 

Among these are:

Identification of JS Content & Links

Sometimes, it’s good to know what’s visible (or, not visible) in the post-execution version of JavaScript. With this improvement, you can see if a page has JS content that’s only in the rendered HTML version. 

Even Screaming Frog found out something new about this.

Compare Raw & Rendered HTML

This is one improvement that one commenter liked.

Does your raw HTML have one thing, but your rendered HTML doesn’t?

For example, does your original HTML have a noindex meta tag that’s not seen in your rendered HTML?

That might be important to know, and with this feature, you can discover such discrepancies. 

Automated Crawl Report For Data Studio

On this site, we’ve written about Google Data Studio, which is basically a platform for blending multiple data sources so that you can get a ‘big picture’ view of things. 

Well, with Screaming Frog’s automation of their crawl report, you can now have this data exported to Google Sheets (and from there, you can import it into Data Studio).

Adv Search & Filters

This is always good to have. If you have a very specific piece of data you want to filter by, you should be able to do so with this version.

Source: Screaming Frog Twitter channel