Custom link positions

Configuration > Custom > Link Positions

The SEO Spider classifies every links position on a page, such as whether it’s in the navigation, content of the page, sidebar or footer for example.

The classification is performed by using each links ‘link path’ (as an XPath) for known semantic substrings and can be seen in the ‘inlinks’ and ‘outlinks’ tabs.

This can help identify ‘inlinks’ to a page that are only from in body content for example, ignoring any links in the main navigation, or footer for better internal link analysis.

If your website uses semantic HTML5 elements (or well-named non-semantic elements, such as div id=”nav”), the SEO Spider will be able to automatically determine different parts of a web page and the links within them.

The default link positions set-up uses the following search terms to classify links.

However, not every website is built in this way, so you’re able to configure the link position classification based upon each sites unique set-up. This allows you to use a substring of the link path of any links, to classify them.

For example, the Screaming Frog website has mobile menu links outside the nav element that are determined to be in ‘content’ links. This is incorrect, as they are just an additional site wide navigation on mobile. This is because they are not within a nav element, and are not well named such as having ‘nav’ in their class name. Doh!

The ‘mobile-menu__dropdown’ class name (which is in the link path as shown above) can be used to define its correct link position using the Link Positions feature.

These links will then be correctly attributed as a sitewide navigation link.

The search terms or substrings used for link position classification are based upon order of precedence. As ‘Content’ is set as ‘/’ and will match any Link Path, it should always be at the bottom of the configuration.

So in the above example, the ‘mobile-menu__dropdown’ class name was added and moved above ‘Content’, using the ‘Move Up’ button to take precedence.

You’re able to disable ‘Link Positions’ classification, which means the XPath of each link is not stored and the link position is not determined. This can help save memory and speed up the crawl.