I’m sure the purists will dive into this post with their hands on their heads, shouting “How on earth can you compare?! You’re absolutely crazy to compare!“, but don’t worry, it’s not a comparison. Let me say upfront that Screaming Frog is my go-to tool for crawling a website, but not everyone has the same resources or needs, and that’s where Beam Us Up comes in, a free alternative.
We’re talking about a free crawler with no URL limits. You know that the free version of Screaming Frog limits you to 500 URLs per project, but in this case, the limit is set by your machine, not the tool. Which is great, as it’s not going to be a limitation for most of you who read me daily.
What is a crawling tool?
For newbies, it’s a crawling tool that, in more user-friendly terms, translates to a “bot” that navigates a website, gathering basic data for SEO. Thanks to this, you can see how this bot behaves and detect errors and areas for improvement in content, links, or whatever.
What does a crawling software detect?
Well, basically, it checks URL by URL for relevant data such as:
- Duplicate titles.
- Missing or duplicate headers.
- Incorrect, missing, or duplicate meta descriptions.
- URL status codes.
- Internal and external linking, as well as depth level.
- Analysis of sitemaps and robots files.
Beam Us Up: Practical examples
In this video, I show you how Beam Us Up works and some real-life use cases with a live website. It’s easy, free, and takes up almost no space on your disk. However, you’ll need to have Java enabled on your PC for it to work.
If you want to download Beam Us Up, you can do so from the official project website. It seems to be getting support from its creators, so we’ll have to keep an eye on it.