Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Dave Elliott on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/01/2014).

Meta tag monitoring tools

does anyone know of a decent way to monitor a website to see if page titles and meta descriptions and things like that change.

Can find a few few extensions and programnmes that will monitor for changes in content, but none seem to count the titles/meta-descriptions in this.
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Dave Elliott: does anyone know of a decent way to monitor a website to see if page titles and meta descriptions and things like that change.

    Can find a few few extensions and programnmes that will monitor for changes in content, but none seem to count the titles/meta-descriptions in this.
  • Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Most people when referencing scraping use Scrapebox (never used it myself). Then there are bigger competitive analysis tools (think like SearchMetric or SEOClarity), but sometimes it's just easier running Regex or JSON in Excel to manually check it yourself.

    Edit: Assuming you want to monitor other sites, not your own.
  • Dave Elliott: yeah other sites. +Micah Fisher-Kirshner ; will scrapebox give me titles/ meta-descriptions? i thought it was purely urls with that one?
  • Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Like I said, never used it, just something I hear people say they use. :/
  • Rahul Chauhan: you can use Google Tag Manager, to control metas of a website
  • Mach Page Speed: +Dave Elliott are you looking for this running automatically? I am working on something very similar to this for myself.
  • Dave Elliott: yeah, automatically +Mach Page Speed ;. I know i could do a crawl with say screaming frog then export out the data and then use some sort of vlookup in excel to get the data.

    But very much looking for a tool to automate this process and preferably informm me when it sees a change. It must exist, surely!
  • Mach Page Speed: +Dave Elliott ;Interesting little twist on what I am working on so I will consider doing it and let you know the progress.

    My next question is...do you know how to set up a cron job, mysql database, etc?
  • Dave Elliott: all those words scare me! ;
  • Mach Page Speed: lol...i really like the base of your idea. Working through the process now. Will update you on the progress.
  • Mach Page Speed: +Dave Elliott ;Is there any other tags besides the following you would like to see listed including all the attributes?

    <a>
    <img>
    <link>
    <meta>
    <script>
    <title>
    <h1> - <h6>
  • Dave Elliott: title and meta-descriptions are the ones i am really bothered by so your list covers everything!
  • Micah Fisher-Kirshner: +Dave Elliott: Relevant article: http://authoritylabs.com/blog/screaming-frog-excel-series-part-2/
  • Mach Page Speed: +Dave Elliott Is what you are looking for ....for specific pages or complete site? I may look at doing this in excel too.
  • Dave Elliott: whole site really
  • Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:58:18 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/meta_tag_monitoring_tools +Dave Elliott

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View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/01/2014).