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  4. How to extract URLs from a site (without bringing the server down!)

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How to extract URLs from a site (without bringing the server down!)

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  • neooptic
    neooptic last edited by Nov 10, 2011, 6:51 AM

    Hi everybody.

    One of my clients is migrating to a new ecommerce platform, and we need to get a list of urls from the existing site to start mapping out the 301 redirects. Usually, I'd use a tool like Xenu or Integrity to crawl and output a list.

    However, the database and server setup is so bad that it can't handle the requests from these tools and it sends the site down. This, unsurprisingly, is one of the reasons for the migration.

    Does anybody know of a way to get a full list of urls without having to make a bunch of http requests which will kill the site? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Dr-Pete
      Dr-Pete Staff last edited by Nov 14, 2011, 7:05 PM Nov 14, 2011, 7:03 PM

      Just a follow-up to my endorsement. It looks like Screaming Frog will let you control the number of pages crawled per second, but to do a full crawl you'll need to get the paid version (the free version only crawls 500 URLs):

      http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

      It's a good tool, and nice to have around, IMO.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Dan-Petrovic
        Dan-Petrovic last edited by Nov 10, 2011, 8:23 AM Nov 10, 2011, 8:23 AM

        Copy the site, set it up on a staging server and run http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ on it?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • AlanMosley
          AlanMosley @neooptic last edited by Nov 10, 2011, 8:13 AM Nov 10, 2011, 8:13 AM

          why not find the links to the site, becauase you will only need to 301 the urls with extenal links. let teh rest 404. i use Bing WMT as it has a most complete collection IMO. they also export to a csv

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • neooptic
            neooptic @YannickVeys last edited by Nov 10, 2011, 7:24 AM Nov 10, 2011, 7:24 AM

            Thanks Yannick, I don't know why I didn't think of using a scraper! Can you recommend any good code (PHP perhaps)?

            AlanMosley 1 Reply Last reply Nov 10, 2011, 8:13 AM Reply Quote 0
            • YannickVeys
              YannickVeys last edited by Nov 14, 2011, 6:54 PM Nov 10, 2011, 6:59 AM

              • Scrape Google?

              • Make your own scraper and keep the requests per second really low ?

              • Maybe the site has an automated sitemap somewhere ?

              • Google webmaster tools -> download "internal links" table

              neooptic 1 Reply Last reply Nov 10, 2011, 7:24 AM Reply Quote 3
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