go webcrawler

To rank well in Google Search, websites need to internally link pages one to another. For example, a blog post about the benefits of haircuts should probably link to my post about the best places to get haircuts.

A Go CLI tool that generates an internal links report for any website on the internet by crawling each page of the site.

Setup

git clone <url>
cd webcrawler
go install

Run

# build
go build main.go -o ./webcrawler && ./crawler <website> <concurrency> <max_pages>
# development
go run main.go <website> <concurrency> <max_pages>

Run with Docker

docker build . -t name:version
docker run -e F=site -e S=concurrency -e T=max_pages name:version

Testing

go test ./...

Ideas for extension

• Make the script run on a timer and deploy it to a server. Have it email you every so often with a report.
• Add more robust error checking so that you can crawl larger sites without issues.
• Count external links, as well as internal links, and add them to the report
• Save the report as a CSV spreadsheet rather than printing it to the console
• Use a graphics library to create an image that shows the links between the pages as a graph visualization
• Make requests concurrently to speed up the crawling process