I recently stumbled upon a brand new web-based service that will crawl your site and report any issues that it encounters. It also generates four different types of sitemaps. The service is a called crawlscore.com and best of all, it’s free!

First Impressions

At first glance, the site, very minimalist. It’s simple, easy to navigate and well laid-out. When I signed up for an account, I assumed that I had to install Javascript code onto my pages in order for the service to do it’s job. I was quickly proved wrong. All you have to do is provide a site name, URL, a range of estimated pages, and a crawl method of either “full site crawl” or “Use robots.txt”.

I added my site and it took me to the dashboard where it said that my site was being crawled. I submitted my blog first and it only took a few minutes until I was able to see the reports.

Once your site has been crawled you click on the “report” button and you are given simple graphics that determine the following:

Search engine friendliness - Determined what percentage of your site’s pages are search engine optimized

Overall visibility of website to search engines - Determined what percentage of your site’s pages are visible to search engines.

Broken links - Determined what percentage of your site’s pages contain broken links or return status codes of anything but 200.

Each of these sections have their own report that tell you which pages need attention.

I like the technical report which is an aggregate of the crawler results. Many of the results are clickable, which take you to the respective pages where you can resolve issues.

By clicking on the “sitemap” button you are give four options for exporting a sitemap:

Google Sitemap - You should already be using this one.

Yahoo Sitemap - Generates a text file that is all your site’s URLs.

HTML Sitemap - This an HTML page with all your your pages as hyperlinks.

ROR Sitemap - This was a new format to me. “ROR promotes the concept of structured feeds (which is related to the concept of structured blogging) enabling search engines to complement text search with structured information to better understand meaning. ”

Final Thoughts

This is a great service that can easily be a replacement or supplement to Google’s rather stagnant Webmaster Central. You get much more recent reporting that guides you in fixing and improving your sites content. Hopefully, in the long run it will appealing the engines and get you the rankings that you strive to achieve.