Screaming Frog Technical Check-up: Crawl Depth and Broken Link Analysis
If you don't want to spend your SEO budget on massive tools but want to see all the underlying technical issues (404s, redirect loops, huge images, duplicated meta tags) in one go, your singular tool is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
1. Broken Links and Redirect Chains
Internal links redirecting to deleted pages on your site waste search engines' Crawl Budget. After finishing the crawl, select the "Client Error (4xx)" filter from the Response Codes tab. When you click on the "Inlinks" part appearing on the bottom panel, you can see exactly which pages on your site link to these broken pages.
Again in the same tab, find unnecessary 301 Redirects with the "Redirection (3xx)" option, and directly replace the link on the source page with the target page. This severely affects page opening speed.
2. Crawl Depth Analysis
Crawl depth shows how many clicks away a page is from your homepage. Google attributes more importance to pages closer to the homepage.
- Depth 0: Homepage only.
- Depth 1-3: SEO-wise most valuable, fastest-indexed pages (Categories, Core products/articles).
- Depth 4+: The danger zone. Hard for visitors and bots to reach here. If your depth goes to 20s due to pagination errors, you must fix your category tree and build a flat site architecture.
🕷️ Custom Extraction Tip
Screaming Frog doesn't just crawl links. You can add a Regex or XPath (e.g., the XPath code for the current stock text on your e-commerce site or the author name in your articles) to the Configuration > Custom > Extraction area. This way, you can pull stock data or author lists across all pages into Excel in seconds.
3. Detecting Hreflang and i18n Issues
If you have a multilingual site (like our site seoaraci.com), you can pinpoint asymmetric redirects pointing to hreflang tags of your pages, unapproved canonicals, and language-region mismatches via Screaming Frog. By weeding out "Non-canonical hreflang" errors, you can build a clean international SEO infrastructure.