SEO: Why Analyze Server Log Files?

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SEO: Why Analyze Server Logs
“Technical” SEO is the keystone that allows search engines to explore, analyze and index the pages of your site . This helps to position your pages in the SERPs , even before you start the SEO work. In other words, there is no point in doing “on-page” SEO if your technical SEO is poor.

Search console , third-party crawlers, and analytics tools do not provide a complete picture of how Googlebot and other search engines interact with a website. There is only one way to examine exactly how search engines treat your website, and that is by analyzing your server log files (or log files) .

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By helping Google do its job, you will be setting the stage for south africa phone number data future SEO work. Log analysis is an important aspect of technical SEO, and fixing issues found in your logs will help you get better rankings, more traffic, and more conversions.

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Example of entries in a log file
Each server logs events differently, but generally they all provide similar information, organized into fields.

Here is an example of accessing an Apache web server (simplified, some fields have been removed):

date and time
the URI response code (in this case, a 404 )
the user agent making the request (in this case, Googlebot)
As you might imagine, log files represent thousands of lines per day, since every time a user or robot lands on your site, entries are recorded for every page requested (including images, CSS, and any other files needed to render the page).

Read Also: SEO: 8 Log Analysis Tools

What to look for in log files?
Analyzing log files reveals a lot of useful information and allows you to, for example:

Discover areas wasted by crawl budget.
View the responses that search engines encounter as they crawl your site, such as 302s, 404s , and soft 404s.
Identify gaps in navigation, which may have broader site-wide implications (such as hierarchy or internal link structure).
Find out which pages are prioritized by search engines and which can be considered the most important.
Find out where your crawl budget is being wasted
Don't know what crawl budget is? We talked about it in this article .

Analyzing log files can reveal that your site's crawl budget is being wasted on irrelevant pages. If you have new content that you want to index but you no longer have a budget, Google will not index this new content. Crawl budget optimization will help search engines crawl and index the most important pages on your website.

Having too many low-value pages can have a negative effect on a site's crawlability and indexing. Low-value URLs can fall into these categories:

Duplicate content
Soft 404
Compromised Pages
Low quality spam content
Don't waste your crawl budget on pages like this. Google will crawl truly valuable pages faster and more often.

Answering Technical SEO Questions
By analyzing log files, we can answer the following questions with much more certainty than if we tried using other tools:

How often are some subdirectories explored?
Are all search engine robots accessing your pages?
Which pages are not being served correctly?
Find out if your site has become Google Mobile-First
You can use a site's server logs to find out if your website is being crawled by Googlebot's smartphone crawler, indicating that it has switched to mobile-first indexing .