Content area

Content area

Configuration > Content > Area

You can specify the content area used for word count, near duplicate content analysis and spelling and grammar checks. This can help focus analysis on the main content area of a page, avoiding known boilerplate text.

The content area settings do not impact link discovery, it is just for content.

By default the SEO Spider will only consider text contained within the body HTML element of a web page. By default both the nav and footer HTML elements are excluded to help focus the content area used to the main content of the page.

However, not all websites are built using these HTML5 semantic elements, and sometimes it’s useful to refine the content area used in the analysis further. You’re able to add a list of HTML elements, classes or ID’s to exclude or include for the content used.

For example, the Screaming Frog website has a mobile menu outside the nav element, which is included within the content analysis by default. The mobile menu can be seen in the content preview of the ‘duplicate details’ tab shown below when checking for duplicate content (as well as the ‘Spelling & Grammar Details’ tab).

By right clicking and viewing source of the HTML of our website, we can see this menu has a ‘mobile-menu__dropdown’ class. The ‘mobile-menu__dropdown’ can then be excluded in the ‘Exclude Classes’ box –

The mobile menu is then removed from near duplicate analysis and the content shown in the duplicate details tab (as well as Spelling & Grammar and word counts).

Content area settings can be adjusted post-crawl for near duplicate content analysis and spelling and grammar. Near duplicates will require ‘crawl analysis‘ to be re-run to update the results, and spelling and grammar requires its analysis to be refreshed via the right hand ‘Spelling & Grammar’ tab or lower window ‘Spelling & Grammar Details’ tab.

Please see our tutorials on finding duplicate content and spelling and grammar checking.