For sites with less than 500 URLs, the free version will suffice; those with larger sites may want to purchase the premium version, although they can always use the free version to get a rough idea of what their site structure does. Now use Screaming Frog to explore the site Shadow Makin you want to map. You don't need to collect the images, CSS, JavaScript, etc., so the spider setup should look like the screenshot below. (However, you'll want to make your own decisions about whether to explore subdomains, etc., depending on your needs and your site's structure.) howling frog Enter the domain you want to verify and click . You can name it whatever you want, but I'll refer to Shadow Makin mine throughout the article as working.csv . Clean up Screaming Frog data in Excel I highly recommend going through your Source and Target columns to look for anomalies. For example, the site I browsed for the screenshots below had anchor links on a large number of pages.
I did a quick search for the hashtag in the Target column and removed them so as not to skew my link stream information. With that, we end up with a spreadsheet that should look like this: This data alone can be quite interesting to analyze – and for that purpose, I recommend Shadow Makin reading Patrick Stox's article, Easy PageRank and Page Group Visualizations with Gephi. In his article, Stox used Gephi to visualize the relationships between pages on a website and to see which pages are the strongest (based on the site's internal linking graph). Gephi Modularity You can read his article for instructions and a description, but in short what we see are different of Shadow Makin pages (based on which pages are linked most often - not perfect but not bad), grouped by color and scaled by internal links (with more linked pages appearing larger).
This information is very practical. But what if we want Shadow Makin more? What if we really want to color pages based on their site section, and what if we want them to be sized based on the number of incoming external links? To do this, you must first download your main linked pages from Google Search Console. If you haven't done so yet, just log in to Shadow Makin your Search Console account and follow these steps: Click data is that for our purposes we need the URLs in the form of a domain, and the table only displays the path. To handle this easily, you can simply: Open the spreadsheet. Insert a new column A before the URL path.