Today I want to talk about what Parsing is and how to do it.
Site parsing is the automatic, systematic collection of data from a site using special programs – Parsers.
In other words, Using the parser you can download all site data, such as:
- Page titles
- Descriptions
- Photos
- Product prices
- Product characteristics and attributes < li>Links to pages
- Meta Title and Description
- See errors on pages and much more
Why do you need this? For example, to quickly download the entire catalog of a supplier’s products from his website or create a Feed for the Merchant Center, do an SEO analysis of the site.
Let’s look at how this works using the example of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider program. You can download it for free, but unfortunately you will need a key to activate it. Fortunately, they can be found on the Internet.
And so, let’s launch our Screaming Frog.
To parse a site, just insert the link to the site in the line at the top and click “Start”
It looks like this
This way you can Parse the standard fields that are configured by default. You will collect a lot of information, but for example, the price of the product, currency or photographs you will not get. To do this, we will need to get a little confused and get into the site code. But not everything is as scary as it might seem.
To extract additional information, we need to give the Parser information “Where to look.”
For example, let’s pull out information about the price on the site:
1. Go to the site, open any product and press F12 on the keyboard (or right-click on the screen and click “View page code”)
In the pop-up window with the code, click the “Select element” button and hover your mouse over the price. On the right in the console you will see the line of code responsible for this element. Right-click on this line and clickCopy -> Copy Full XPath
We copied the Path to the information we need. Return to Screaming Frog and click on Configuration -> Custom -> Extraction
In the window that pops up, click “+Add”, name the field as convenient for us, insert our Path and click “OK”.
We start parsing and now we have a new field “Price 1”
Save the Parsing (Ctrl+S), click Export, export the data to an Excel file and you’re done.
All that remains is to clear the unnecessary data and the parsing is ready.
