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Just compared a manual web crawl to a paid SEO tool for finding broken links
The manual crawl using Screaming Frog's free version found 47 broken links the expensive tool missed, because it actually followed every redirect chain. Anyone else ditched their fancy software for something simpler?
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robertsmith2mo ago
Saw a blog post about this exact thing last week. They said the fancy tools often just check the first page, not the whole redirect path. Makes sense why you'd find more with the manual check.
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palmer.thomas2mo ago
Tell me about it, that checks out.
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brian_murray1mo ago
Oh jeez, I actually have to push back a little on that blog post thing. Those fancy tools can be pretty hit or miss depending on how they're set up (and honestly, a lot of them are just poorly coded). The issue is that most of them will follow the first redirect just fine, but they stop if there's a chain of like three or four hops. You gotta check each step manually sometimes because a site might hide a 301 redirect behind another 301 redirect, and the tool just reports the last one it saw without telling you the whole messy path. It's not even about checking just the first page - it's about trusting the tool to do what it says on the tin. I've found broken redirects where the tool said "all good" but manually clicking through showed a 404 on the third hop, so yeah, be careful with those automated checks.
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