How To Find The
Best Web Crawlers At Zero Cost?
Author : Jyothish
AIMLEAP Automation Works Startups | Digital | Innovation | Transformation
Table of Contents
A. What Is Web Crawler?
B. Things To Look For Before Choosing a Best Web Crawlers
- Friendly User Interface
- Features Offered
- Auto robot.txt File And Sitemap Detection
- Auto Broken Pages And Links Detection
- HTTP/ HTTPS Redirect Issue Identification
- Easy Google Analytics Connectivity
- Delivery In Multiple File Formats
- Multiple Device Support
You are about to start a digital business venture, but don’t know anything about it. The digital growth of any business is influenced by its Google ranking.
Google now controls 86.86% of the search engine market.
As Google holds power, it’s very important to improve your ranking on this particular search engine through SEO. Manual analysis of websites to boost your SEO ranking visibility is time-consuming and prone to error. A web crawler or search engine bot is the most effective way to automatically find broken links, missing page titles, duplicate content, and recognize major problems involved in a website through web crawling. The internet is constantly transforming and expanding and with the use of a self-adapting website crawler or site crawler, every challenge coming your way while indexing web pages can be easily handled. The best web crawlers moves swiftly from one web page to another to accurately identify technical issues in your websites and improve its structure to make it understandable by search engines. To find the best web crawlers, there are certain things that you need to consider.
What Is Web Crawler?
Google’s top result receives roughly 32% of all clicks.
There is a huge importance of web analysis to grow and achieve the top rank on search engines. By harnessing the power of automation, businesses can make the process of website analysis effortless. A web crawler is a way to automate data extraction & auditing for common SEO issues. A web crawler simply refers to software that conducts web crawling on the world wide web for the purpose of web indexing and obtaining data from multiple web pages. Website crawler is also known as the spider, spider bots, bots, scraper, robots, site crawler, and many more. The process of web crawling involves exploring the web pages, video clips, PDF documents, or even image files for data by going through multiple links. The best web crawlers always catches up with the latest development on the internet. Along with access to a large volume of data, the best web crawlers also saves your time and money.
Things To Look For Before Choosing a Best Web Crawlers
Organic search accounts for 53.3% of all website visitors. Data analysis and SEO issue auditing hold the key to a successful future for a digital business. Whenever you collect data, choose the best web crawlers that swiftly crawls millions of web pages in minutes and gathers key onsite data in real-time. The best web crawlers comes with multiple features and functionalities. The things you should check in a website crawler or site crawler for the process of web crawling are –
1. Friendly User Interface
User Interface is something that creates a bond between users and a digital tool. The best web crawlers always comes with a friendly user interface. It should not make things impossible to get to. The web crawler should be easy to navigate and placed strategically for the users. Unique patterns and designs seem tempting, but they make the task hard and challenging. So whenever you choose a website crawler, just stick to simplicity.
2. Features Offered
The top features that the best web crawlers must have are auto-execution of project, data scraping in multiple threads, automatic control on crawling speed, scalability, easy setup, etc. A paid web crawler might come with advanced features that make data extraction simple, but a free website crawler with basic features and highly accurate data delivery should be your first priority.
3. Auto robot.txt File And Sitemap Detection
Many websites have robots.txt which provides or denies access to URLs and specific content. If a website has robots.txt, it means the content is not crawlable. If a web crawler crawls websites with a crawl limit to avoid network congestion, it should not stop. The best web crawlers should be able to detect robots.txt and sitemap while crawling web pages. Auto-detection simplifies the work of a website crawler and improves efficiency.
4. Auto Broken Pages And Links Detection
A broken page or link is challenging to be found and accessed by a user. The best web crawler is always able to detect broken pages and links and improve navigation and crawlability. So, whenever you choose a web crawler, make sure that it can instantly find broken links and server errors with ease.
5. HTTP/ HTTPS Redirect Issue Identification
HTTP redirect error means that the URL crawled by a web crawler is either old or expired and the web server is permanently redirecting to another URL. This is one of the most common challenges that appear while crawling a website. Whenever you find a website crawler, make sure to choose the one that can deal with site redirect issues. Today, the best web crawler has a dynamic mechanism to identify and handle HTTP/ HTTPS redirect issues.
6. Easy Google Analytics Connectivity
Opt for the best web crawler that integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. When a web crawler easily integrates with Google Analytics, it fetches user and performance data for greater insight. A website crawler with a smart mechanism and robust build easily adapts to changes and challenges.
7. Delivery In Multiple File Formats
With a dynamic web crawler, the reports can be exported into multiple formats like CSV and Excel. While choosing the best web crawler, always check, in which format the web reports are delivered. The website crawler must provide users with multiple options of report formats.
8. Multiple Device Support
The web crawler you choose must crawl the websites from tablets, mobile devices, and desktops. It should support multiple devices and make web crawling flexible for the user. Multiple device support is the identity of the best web crawler.
Also read: Leading Web Crawling Services Provider For Quality Data (2025)
Some Of The Best Web Crawlers Available For Free
A report by Ahrefs states that Google sends no organic search traffic to 90.63% of web pages.
To grow in this digital world, one needs to improve the ranking of one’s website using the correct SEO tactics. To boost SEO ranking, there is an important need for a web crawler that can recognize major problems in a website through thorough web crawling. You can find a website crawler matching your business needs for free. Here is the list of the best web crawlers or site crawlers that can crawl both small and large websites efficiently and deliver results in real-time.
1. ApiScrapy
ApiScrapy offers pre-built, advanced web crawlers to the customers and automates their web data collection process. The data collected through ApiScrapy web crawlers, is accurate, rich and decision-driven. Millions of web pages can be scraped through the AI-powered site crawler. You can enrich your database with high quality content delivered without any interruption through a power data scraper that can easily evade bot-protected sites and collect voluminous data.
2. Cyotek WebCopy
Copy partial or full websites locally for offline reading using Cyotek WebCopy, a free site crawler. This smart crawler can scan websites to discover resources like other pages, images, videos, content, etc. The tool can be personalized to crawl a website in the way you want it to be crawled. Cyotek WebCopy lacks a virtual DOM and does not support JavaScript parsing. If a website heavily relies on JavaScript to function, WebCopy is unlikely to be able to create a genuine copy while web crawling.
3. Getleft
Getleft is a free site crawler with an easy-to-use UI. Using this tool, a user can conduct web crawling and download the entire website. What makes Getleft the best web crawler is multilingual support. This tool supports 14 languages and is compatible with basic business needs.
4. HTTrack
HTTrack is an open-source, free site crawler that can be used by professionals with advanced programming skills to download the entire website on the computer. Using this tool, you can do unlimited web crawling to collect data for web analysis and build the structure of your website. It is the best web crawler that offers two versions command line and GUI. Links that are generated with JavaScript can be crawled using HTTrack. To maximize speed, it offers proxy support. It has a friendly user interface that allows the user to simply navigate to a page of the “mirrored” website in their browser.
5. Scraper Wiki
Scraper Wiki offers a site crawler whose free service is as elegant as the paid service. They have also committed to offering premium accounts to journalists at no cost. Their free online web scraper can scrape PDF versions of documents. Scraper Wiki’s Quick Code has a Python and R data analysis environment, which is ideal for statisticians, economists, and data managers who are beginners to coding. Journalists, data enthusiasts, and researchers call it the best web crawler.
6. Octoparse
Almost all kinds of data can be extracted using Octoparse for web crawling. This site crawler is crafted for Windows and Mac OS users. It is the best web crawler that offers cloud-based services, with at least six cloud servers doing user tasks concurrently. It also enables cloud data storage and more advanced cloud service choices. The UI of Octoparse is very user-friendly which allows you to extract data effortlessly in a structured format like EXCEL, TXT, HTML. Octoparse bypasses all types of anti-scraping measures adopted by dynamic websites.
7. Anysite Scraper
Anysite Scraper is an advanced site crawler that can be customized to scrape all kinds of websites including eCommerce, social media, web directories, local pages, and yellow pages, etc. Data like business name, person name, email id, address, website link, email address, phone number, reviews, ratings, etc. can be collected through web crawling. This is the best web crawler that allows you to create your own website scraper projects for any website with a script builder. Features offered by Anysite Scraper are keyword-based searching, browser support, auto-save, and recovery, save viewed profiles history, auto-scroll loaded page, filters, auto-pagination, data extraction in EXCEL format, CSV files, and other formats.
8. Outwit Hub Light
Simplify your data search using the best web crawler called Outwit Hub Light. With modern data extraction features, sophisticated scraping functions, and data structure recognition, the free site crawler serves a wide range of needs. You can do web crawling and collect links, data, documents, or images without requiring any programming skills or advanced technical knowledge. This tool allows the user to exported data to CSV, HTML, Excel, JSON, XML format.
9. Content Grabber
Crafted for enterprise-level web crawling, Content Grabber is an advanced site crawler that allows you to create stand-alone web crawling agents. Content Grabber is reputed as the best web crawler among business leaders because it can extract data from almost any website and save it in a pre-specified format of your choice, like Excel, XML, CSV, etc.
10. ScrapeStorm
Crafted by the ex-Google crawler team, ScrapeStorm is an easy-to-use & free site crawler. The user doesn’t require any coding or programming language to conduct web crawling and collect data using ScrapeStorm. Based on AI algorithm, this tool automatically identifies accurate lists, forms, links, phone numbers, images, prices, emails, etc. This is the last, but the best web crawler that helps export data in Excel, CSV, TXT, HTML, MySQL, MongoDB, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, WordPress, and Google Sheets.
Conclusion
If a best web crawler is not your thing and you are searching for a web crawling services provider for your project, then choose OutsourceBigdata. The company offers world-class web crawling solutions according to your business desires. Professionals at OutsourceBigdata provide complete control on your web data extraction project. Using the most advanced website crawler crafted by their own professionals, they conduct web indexing. OutsourceBigdata provides web crawling services for enterprise companies, small, medium, and large.
Also Read:
Top 10 Open Source Web Crawling Tools To Watch Out In 2024
How AI-Augmented Catalogue Services Can Benefit Your e-Commerce Business?
10 Benefits of Free Web Scraping Services Over Paid Web Scraping Services
FAQ' s
Are web crawlers free?
How do I choose the best web crawler?
Ease of use: Tools like Octoparse are great for beginners.
Customizability: If you need more control, try Scrapy.
Purpose: Googlebot is for search engines, while others are good for scraping data.
What web crawler does Google use?
Is it legal to use a web crawler?
Do best web crawlers still exist?
What is the fastest best web crawler?
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