Regex, or Regular Expressions, is essentially a tool for pattern matching. Regex is a staple of search engines, find and replace utilities, and is a native or add-on capability of many programming languages.
Combining “Find” with a web crawler can be extremely powerful for identifying errors and extracting data.
This feature is still relatively new to commercially available SEO tools.
Custom extraction, using regex (or Xpath or CSSpath), was only added to Screaming Frog SEO Spider in the July 2015 release. Up until that time, SEOTools for Excel was perhaps the most accessible tool for regex extraction – but only when combined with a crawler like Screaming Frog to first collect URLs to analyze.
Regex searching and extraction is perhaps the single most useful, yet largely unknown skill, for web operations, SEO practitioners, web analytics teams, researchers, community managers, and digital marketers of all types.
REGEX FOR SEO
RESOURCE NAME | TYPE | AUTHOR |
|---|---|---|
Beginner Guide To Regex For SEO | Guide | JC Chouinard |
Principles of Regular Expressions for an SEO | Guide | Tomek Rudzki / Onely |
Regular Expressions for SEOs and Digital Marketers [with Use Cases] | Guide | Alyona Petrukhina / Netpeak Software |
Regular Expressions for Regular Joes (and SEOs) | Presentation | Paul Shapiro |
URL Regex Builder | Resources | JR Oakes |
Regex for Marketers: Plain English, Real World Examples [VIDEO] | Guide | Annie Cushing |