How to Quickly Gather Link Data Using Screaming Frog and Sheets

Key Takeaways

so let's say we get a link report back from a vendor a VA whoever maybe and all we have is our firm domains that we got to link from but we don't necessarily have what target page on our site it's linking to if there are multiple links to us on the same page what anchor texts that were using or anything like that this tool this sheet combined with screaming frog allows us to quickly export all that data and instead of manually checking 50 links it has about depending on how the links are rendered at the rendered in javascript those ones you're gonna have to manually check yourself but it'll parse out 80 to 95% of the links saving you a lot of time in the process so let me show you what I mean so let's say you get back a link report that just has the world's you have I just grabbed like five or six links from that and that has two a site I'm just gonna copy the entire column even if they're not all URL see I have the header here that's fine cuz screaming frog will automatically take out anything that's not a URL so I'm gonna go into screaming frog I'm gonna go into my configuration I want to make sure that I'm not crawling linked to sitemaps I want to make sure that I'm checking external links and I want to make sure that I'm only rendering text if you render JavaScript it's gonna grab a bunch of odd things that you don't necessarily want it can make it a little bit harder to read the the sheets document which is why any links that you can only find through rendering JavaScript you're gonna have to manually search yourself or if you wanted to you could mess mess around with the doc and have it work while JavaScript rendering is enabled but that will take a little bit extra work on your part and I simply just haven't gotten around to doing that so it's not a functionality built in as of this time anyways we're gonna change our mode to list this is where we're just going to paste because we already copied all the URLs and it automatically stripped anything it's not URL then we're gonna crawl this the reason why we uncheck sitemaps is because right here it just crawled all the same maps cuz I apparently I still have that checked so let me just configuration do not crawl sitemaps start in there now we have six html's six all otherwise are gonna have HTML sitemaps in there that could pulled in but from here we're gonna go to bulk export all out links so now we just exported every internal and external link on the site meaning we have going to our site and the links to everyone else's site and their own sites this is gonna be a really messy document but sheets will automatically clean this up for us so we're just gonna go to import and we're getting import our all out link CSV file that we just got from the screaming frog place data that selected cell this is on the import sheet and here we have this messy document of all the link boards from where it's going and the anchor text used so we have the data that we want in there we just need to parse the data to get what we need so let's go to the links file so this is a little bit messy and I'll show you how to clean it up pretty easily let me just remove that cuz you're gonna have to ensure that yourself here we go so this is how it's gonna look if you were to go through this process right now it's gonna tell you the number of unique imports and how many links it found for you so you want these numbers to match each other and first you need to enter the client domain the root domain no HTTP and www just the root domain so just in this case diggity marketing.com and this will pull in anything that has the destination containing diggidy marketing.com in it so we can see here that every once a while we'll have an outlier like this so all these other ones are completely valid this just happens to have a string we're taking to marketing shows up so in this case what we do we'd come to tools we come to macros and we would do links paste a quite paste of value what this does is we run the script and once you copy this sheet you're gonna have to authorize it on Google's end so I'll just pause the video and come back oh here it is and I'm gonna authorize it then it's gonna run the script and this will just take all the links and paste them so instead of having equations we can now just delete this line now we have our outlier is gone and because this these are all text links number of inputs six six unique URL to input it in the number of links it found with six this is equal set screen if you somehow messed up we can just reverse this by doing replace equations and it'll just replace the equations for you so what this will also do is this has this fine manually for any links that it couldn't find the data you need for it so we scroll down here to the bottom and I'll just manually and put something here let's say we also had a link from example.com slash page but because it can't find the destination on Dignity marketing comm it's going to let me just also review the pace macro get rid of that line so we have seven unique URLs input it but we only found six links so that's when we'd have our VA s or whoever go to the find manually and instead of having to search these seven pages manually you just have to search this one it comes really handy especially with citations a lot of citation links are generated through JavaScript however unless you crawl with JavaScript enabled you're going to get a bunch of messy stuff so I would say for every 50 let's say citations that I import I have to check or have someone checked between five and seven of them on average so instead of manually checking fifty URLs to find an anchor in the destination page to make sure it's all right in this case they're only checking five to seven of them which saves a whole lot of time and that's how the she works in it then we enter in this information here all right that's the anchor that's the destination this also checks to manually a found sheet so I know change the count so in total we found the same number that we imported so we're good to go in this case and then we can just copy this data into whatever we're using to track our links internally