List of Web Crawlers & Types of Web Crawlers (2024)

In the following blog, you will explore the list of the best Web Crawlers. Keep reading to know more about web crawlers and their ability to boost your SEO ranking visibility. Web crawlers are often referred to as spider bots or just spiders. Due to their wide application, web crawlers are no longer an unknown term. Among their major purposes, indexing web pages and reaping the competitor’s data are included. Before we further talk about web crawlers, their types, and the best ones out there, you need to understand the difference between web crawlers and web scraping. Often these two terms are taken as the same.

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What Is Web Crawler or Web Scraping?

Web scraping is simply getting data extracted from all over the internet. It presents the data in structured forms like Excel and CSV etc. Later, it can be used for textual analysis for research or for other purposes. On the other hand, a web crawler is used to scan web pages for indexing and also provides useful information to users to boost your SEO ranking and website’s visibility. So web scraping tools are to be used when you want to collect data quickly and automatically for data analysis ( You may also read about data breaches)While crawlers can be used for web pages indexing and SEO. Hope now you have understood the difference. Here’s how web crawlers are nothing less than magical bots.

Benefits of Web Crawling

  • Enables the search engines to crawl your web pages to show in the search engine like Google Crawler Bot and Bingbot. Also, read how to run a Google Chrome virus scan.
  • It helps the users to identify their website technical issues like identifying broken links, missing headings, backlinks, and more. An example of this crawler is the Semrush bot.
  • To spy on the competitor so you can design your better-competing SEO strategy. Engaging a search engine marketing agency can provide the expertise and tools needed to significantly improve your competitive SEO strategies.

So above are just some benefits; it’s up to you how you want to take benefit of crawling bots.

Types of Web Crawlers

There are three main types of web crawlers:

  1. In house web crawlers
  2. Commercial web crawlers
  3. Open source web crawlers

1. In house web crawlers

These are like private crawlers where companies develop their own crawler to solve in-house problems.

  • AppleBot
  • GoogleBot
  • Baiduspider

2. Commercial web crawlers

Commercial web crawlers are developed by companies to offer their services by selling them.

3. Open-source web crawlers

These are open-source code web crawlers available on the internet. So, users can modify them according to their needs.

  • Apache Nutch
  • Apify SDK
  • JSpider

Discover why choosing a good proxy for scraping is critical for optimizing SEO and web crawling efficiency.

List of the Best Web Crawlers

1. Semrush

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Semrush is an industry-leading software with a powerful crawler bot. After putting a site URL, the crawler will present the results in almost no time. The beauty of Semrush is that the user won’t need to struggle to find technical issues. Their intelligent web crawler can perform a complete site audit enabling the user to improve site performance.

  • Industry-leading web crawler
  • Provide information regarding backlinks, internal links, HTTP/HTTPS, page loading time, and more
  • Identify your competitors
  • Analyze website from a single dashboard
  • Availability of both free and paid plan

Tip: Using public WiFi can put your privacy at serious risk. That is why using a VPN like iProVPN will be a wise decision during data collection and SEO work. A VPN encrypts your data and routes your internet traffic via the VPN server. You may check out in detail what is a VPN.

2. Ahrefs

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Ahrefs helps the users to rock their website SEO. Their database-rich crawler powers around 12 trillion links. With such a huge database, it won’t miss any important information. When you start the crawl, after adding the project, it will analyze your site for 100 predefined issues. Whether it’s the site performance, incoming links, outgoing links, CSS, or content quality, the tool will help you out with everything.

  • Enormous database
  • Simple and easy to use
  • One of the best tools for competitor backlink analysis
  • Their crawler can help you to identify content opportunities

3. Mangools

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In discovering the content on the internet, Mangools can also be your best companion. From identifying new opportunities to crawling your competition data, it can do everything. It can also identify your competitor’s top-performing content.

  • A complete pack of 5 tools
  • Effectively crawl the keywords from the internet
  • Makes easy which keyword to target
  • Their web crawler can scan internal as well as external links
  • Users can get take a drive through their 10-days free trial account

4. Screaming Frog

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Screaming Frog spider can be defined as one of the most detailed and advanced auditing tools. Where manual checking can take hours or even days, Screaming Frog crawler is efficient to perform in-depth analysis on both small to large websites in a matter of minutes. One of the most exciting parts is that you can set schedule crawls and auto exports data on services like Google Sheets.

  • A powerful spider to crawl a website
  • Users can take a look at the tool excellence via a free plan
  • Can identify broken links, redirects, and duplicate content
  • Google Search Console integration and free technical support

5. SE Ranking

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SE Ranking offers a variety of SEO tools for agencies and in-house teams, including its top-notch Website Crawler that can crawl up to 1,000 pages in just 2 minutes or even less. This tool provides comprehensive data on website technical health, groups issues by type and severity, and highlights all the essential SEO metrics. You can customize crawling according to needs and generate powerful reports to share with your team and clients.

  • Quick and fully customizable site crawling
  • In-depth analysis of pages, links, images, CSS/JavaScript files
  • 18 error categories with fix tips for each issue
  • Crawl comparison features to track progress
  • Intuitive dashboard with advanced filtering
  • Generous crawling limits with up to 150,000 pages per project

6. Netpeak Spider

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A recommended and useful crawler for exploring site issues. The tool efficiency comes into play where it can analyze site optimization against 100+ parameters. A poorly optimized SEO makes greater chances for the google crawler to avoid your web pages, which underscores the importance of partnering with a reputable Search Engine Optimization Agency to enhance your site’s performance and visibility. Netpeak Spider can also check for 80+ key SEO points and suggest what’s best for your site.

  • A reliable tool for SEO audit and SERP scraping
  • Free access requiring no credit card
  • Scan both internal and external links
  • Help to improve internal website ranking

7. Content King

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Content king is getting more and more popular because of its real-time monitoring system. It gives you updates of SEO issues at the occurrence. Furthermore, its great tracking system provides you with the best results about the changes made on the website. Content King emails the website owners when anyone makes any website changes, and that’s something that makes it the best fit for agencies.

  • Straightforward user interface
  • Detects issues before they become a problem
  • A complete cloud-based tool requires no installation
  • Users can get initial experience with a free trial account

8. Sitechecker.pro

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Sitechecker pro is famous for its user-friendly interface and remarkably accurate results. At an affordable price, plus its improved SEO tool combined with effective UI makes it an excellent choice for Digital marketers, Website owners, SEO specialists, and many others. Moreover, it offers a dashboard containing all the necessary stats in it, which makes it clean and less sluggish.

  • Provides you all the Guidance
  • Comes with a browser extension
  • Keep you updated in any critical situation
  • Offers monitoring of Website health, backlinks, and track of keywords
  • 24/7 customer care.

Conclusion

This was our featured list of the best web crawlers. The above-listed crawlers can meet the needs of most users. However, some offer more functionality than others. So, it is up to you what crawler suits you best as per your needs.

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List of Web Crawlers & Types of Web Crawlers (2024)

FAQs

Is an example of a web crawler? ›

Google: Googlebot (actually two crawlers, Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Mobile, for desktop and mobile searches) Bing: Bingbot. DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckBot.

Is Google search a web crawler? ›

Google Search is a fully-automated search engine that uses software known as web crawlers that explore the web regularly to find pages to add to our index.

Do web crawlers still exist? ›

It is not as popular as it used to be, however, you can still search for information on the platform and get relevant results. According to SimilarWeb, WebCrawler has only 240,000 monthly visitors, making it not even in the top 100,000 websites in the world.

What is the best web crawler? ›

Top 10 Open Source Web Crawler in 2024
  • Scrapy. Scrapy is an advanced web crawling and scraping framework based on Python. ...
  • Beautiful Soup. Beautiful Soup is a Python library used to extract data from HTML and XML files. ...
  • Apache Nutch. ...
  • Crawler4j. ...
  • Katana. ...
  • Puppeteer. ...
  • Selenium. ...
  • Jsoup.
Mar 1, 2024

Is selenium a web crawler? ›

Originally developed for testing websites across different browsers, Selenium is now widely used for automating web browsers for various tasks such as taking screenshots, managing cookies, and, crucially for us, web scraping.

Is Yahoo a web crawler? ›

Slurp Bot

Yahoo Search results come from the Yahoo web crawler Slurp and Bing's web crawler, as a lot of Yahoo is powered by Bing.

What is the first web crawler? ›

The first web crawler, named World Wide Web Wanderer, was developed by Matthew Gray in 1993. Its purpose was to measure the size of the web by counting the number of accessible web pages. Shortly after, the first popular search engine, WebCrawler, was launched.

What is a crawler in AWS? ›

AWS crawlers are an essential part of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) data integration and analytics services, particularly within AWS Glue. AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analysis.

Is it illegal to web crawler? ›

If you're doing web crawling for your own purposes, then it is legal as it falls under the fair use doctrine such as market research and academic research. The complications start if you want to use scraped data for others, especially commercial purposes.

What else is a web crawler known as? ›

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).

Is DuckDuckGo a crawler based search engine? ›

To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results.

What is hidden web crawler? ›

A hidden web crawler, however, tries to crawl the deep web. Web pages that are part of the deep web cannot simply be accessed through static links. Instead, the search engine needs specific keywords or user registration to access parts of the deep web.

How do I find a web crawler? ›

How Is a Crawler Detected? Web crawlers typically use the User-Agent header in an HTTP request to identify themselves to a web server. This header is what identifies the browser used to access a site. It can be any text but commonly includes the browser type and version number.

Can you block web crawlers? ›

By using robots. txt, you can prevent certain parts of your site from being indexed by search engines and crawled by web crawlers. It's important to note that robots. txt does not provide any type of security, but it can help protect sensitive or confidential information from being exposed to the public internet.

What are the different types of crawling in SEO? ›

Google performs two types of crawling:
  • Discovery: To find new content on your website.
  • Refresh: To find updated information in already-indexed content.

What is web crawling techniques? ›

Web crawlers systematically browse webpages to learn what each page on the website is about, so this information can be indexed, updated and retrieved when a user makes a search query. Other websites use web crawling bots while updating their own web content.

What is the difference between a web crawler and a web scraper? ›

The short answer. The short answer is that web scraping is about extracting data from one or more websites. While crawling is about finding or discovering URLs or links on the web. Usually, in web data extraction projects, you need to combine crawling and scraping.

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