Comparison of Alarm and Screaming Frog Website
Screaming Frog is a website analysis tool. Its task is to collect and help analyze various information about the SEO site to specialists. Generated reports are more background information, food for thought, than a troubleshooting tool.
Site Alarm is a site audit tool that finds errors and gives clear recommendations for correction. Each line of the report is a found problem that should be fixed.
Next, we will list those functions of the Screaming Frog program that relate specifically to site audit, not analysis.
| Alarm website | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Broken links Broken links and server errors | ||
| Redirects permanent, temporary, JavaScript redirects and metadata updates. | ||
| Blocked URLs | ||
| Blocked resources View and audit blocked resources in rendering mode. | ||
| External links View all external links, their status codes and source pages. | ||
| Security Detect insecure pages, insecure file upload connections, insecure forms, missing security headers. | ||
| Problems with URLs Uppercase characters or long URLs. | ||
| Page titles Missing or multiple header tags. | ||
| Meta description Missing, duplicate, long, short, or multiple descriptions. | ||
| File size The size of URLs and images. | ||
| Response time Checking how long it takes pages to respond to requests. | ||
| Expires header | ||
| H1 Missing, duplicate, long, short, or multiple headers. | ||
| Meta tag [http-equiv=”refresh”] including landing page and time delay. | ||
| Redirection chains Discover redirection chains and loops. | ||
| hreflang attributes checking for missing supporting links, inconsistent and incorrect language codes, and non-canonical hreflang. | ||
| Rendering Parsing dynamically generated links by JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS and React. | ||
| Images The alt attribute is missing. | ||
| Analysis of Sitemap Availability, correctness, and search for broken pages. | ||
| Structured data and validation Checking structured data for compliance Schema.org technical specifications and Google search functions. | ||
| Spelling and grammar of Headings and meta tags. | ||
| Checking AMP |
The list is missing:
- Duplication or suboptimal length of the H1 tag - this tag has lost its significance due to the development of search engine algorithms. Now such checks are of little relevance.
- Problems with URLs: non–ASCII characters, underscores, parameters — these checks are harmful, since such URLs are correct.
- Accurate detection and close to duplicate pages using advanced algorithmic checks are analytical data designed to facilitate the search for duplicate pages. But whatever the algorithm is, it will cause a lot of false positive and false negative positives, making such a check almost useless.
- keywords meta tag — this meta tag has not been relevant for a long time.
- Checking H2 headers is a redundant and useless check.
- Meta tags for robots: index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, as well as the title X-Robots-Tag - search engines have long learned to do without these instructions when working. And you need to close pages from indexing through robots.txt
- Search for missing pages in the sitemap - the site map should not contain all the pages of the site, but only those that need to be indexed by search engines. Automatically adding all pages to this file is harmful.
- Complete spelling and grammar check — checking the grammar of pages is unprofitable, as it causes a huge number of false positive positives. Browsing a huge list is time-consuming. All texts on the site are edited by a person and office programs with a built-in grammar check function before publication.