I got an email newsletter and in it was an article talking about a new SQL injection tester from HP. It’s called Scrawlr. Basically it runs through your site testing to see if you have some basic SQL injection vulnerabilities. Not a bad idea actually. It’s kind of surprising how little some people take security into account these days.
Anyway the usefulness of this tool is 2 fold:
Obviously to test your site against some common SQL injection attacks. Not a bad thing if you just set it up and want to see if it’s at least somewhat secure.
As far as SEO goes it allows you to see how a less sophisticated spider can and does crawl your site. If you run this tool and it only shows a couple of links even though you have a bunch then you have big issues as far as search engine friendliness goes.
In the case of one of the sites I work with it found 4846 URL’s no vulnerabilities.
4846 URL’s is way above what is actually there so it seems to be registering session ID’s as unique URL’s. Though there could be some linking issues as well. Needless to say I am looking into it. Anyway duplicate content can be a big problem for sites that have multiple links with different url’s and anchor text leading to any given page. That type of onsite linking structure immediately set’s up dup content issues.

You have to keep in mind that a spider only registers a piece of content by the url’s it found by. If it finds the exact same content under several different url’s it forces the SE to figure out which one is the original and then discount and/or filter out the rest. What it boils down to is that the less you give the spiders and search engines to think about and compare the better.

When it comes to onsite linking structure 1 link and url (same anchor text and url) pointing to a given page or piece of content is the best way to go. You don’t want a link in your nav bar pointing to something and then another link somewhere else, like the footer, pointing to the same thing with a different url and anchor text. Something I see a far amount of is people using their sites search function to find a product and then copying that url into the href tag. That is one of the easiest way’s to get duplicate content.
So If you want another way to look your site over as far as crawlability goes and to check some basic security issues then this can be a somewhat useful tool. It’s free and can be found here