If you use one of the default setups, Heritrix assumes you want related resources required to render the source page/site – such as offsite images, frames, javascript, and so on. Heritrix also by default errs on the side of inclusiveness, so sometimes it goes a couple hops off a target site when following links whose necessity is unclear.

When using a DecidingScope (or other DecideRules chain) as your scope, eliminating or adjusting the TransclusionDecideRule controls whether and how deep off-site Heritrix goes. TooManyHopsDecideRule can be adjusted to control the number of outlink hops are followed. The default (crawler-beans) settings are intended to be moderately inclusive; following many outlinks and allowing the crawler to discover and follow transcluded and speculative content. Transcluded content includes that which is necessary to render a page. Speculative content is content that appears to be discoverable by the crawler during its configured discovery processes, i.e. anything that "looks" like a link.

As an alternate example, if you wanted to limit crawling strictly to http://www.example.com/ from default (crawler-beans) settings, then specifying (reject) TooManyHopsDecideRule maxHops = 0 and (accept) TransclusionDecideRule maxTransHops = 0 and maxSpeculativeHops = 0 would prevent the crawler from downloading (or discovering links from) pages more than zero hops from http://www.example.com/ - or, trivially download a single page. You can expand your crawl by not rejecting outlink hops (maxHops > 0) and allowing more transclusion or speculative discovery (maxTansHops,maxSpeculativeHops > 0), and by including additional helpful hosts in your list of seeds or SURT prefixes. Examining the output of short, initial test crawls is helpful in determining how to configure the crawler's scope for the desired results.

Legacy scopes (SurtPrefixScope, DomainScope, HostScope, PageScope) have a similar hops setting but are less configurable and efficient and no longer recommended.