How log files help SEO

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Now that we have a basic understanding of log files, let’s take a look at how they help SEO. Here are some key methods: Crawl Monitoring – Can see the URLs crawled by search engines and use it to spot crawler traps, find crawl budget waste, or better understand crawl speeds after content changes. Status Code Reporting – This is especially useful for bugs that need to be fixed first, rather than knowing that the page has a 404 status, you can see exactly how many times a user/search engine visited a 404 URL. Trend Analysis – By monitoring crawls of URLs, page types/parts of your site, or your entire site, you can spot changes and investigate potential causes. Discovering Island Pages – Data from log files can be cross-analysed with the site crawls you run yourself to discover island pages. All sites benefit from log file analysis to some extent, but the benefits will vary depending on the size of the site. This is because log files benefit sites by better managing crawls , and Google itself says the beneficiaries of managing crawl budgets tend to be sites that are larger or change frequently.


The same goes for log file analysis. For example, a smaller website might be able to CMS Web Designs use the Crawl Statistics data available in Google Search Console to get all of the above benefits without having to access log files. Yes, Google does not provide all crawled URLs (as log files), and trend analysis is limited to three months of data. But small sites that don't change frequently also need some ongoing technical SEO, and letting a website auditor find and diagnose problems is enough. For example cross analysis from site crawlers, XML sitemaps, Google Analytics and Google Search Console may uncover any orphan pages. You can also use Site Auditor to spot error status codes from internal links. I point it out specifically for a few key reasons: Obtaining access log files is not easy (more on this next). For smaller sites that change infrequently, log files are not of much benefit, which means the SEO focus may shift elsewhere. How to access your log files In most cases to analyze a log file, you must first request access to the log file from the developer . The developers may then encounter some issues that will be brought to your attention, these include: Partial Data – Log files can contain partial data that is spread across multiple servers.




This often happens when developers use various servers, such as origin servers, load balancers, and CDNs. Obtaining sufficient information from all logs may mean compiling access logs from all servers. File Size – Access log file sizes for high-traffic sites can reach terabytes, if not petabytes, making them difficult to transport. Privacy/Compliance – Log files include user IP addresses which are personally identifiable information (PII). User information may need to be deleted before it can be shared with you. Storage History – Due to file size, developers may have configured access logs to only store them for a few days, which becomes less useful for spotting trends and issues. These issues can make one question whether storing, merging, filtering, and transmitting log files is worth the developer effort, especially if the developer already has a long priority list of work to do (which is often the case). Developers may put the onus on SEO people to explain/build a case for why developers should invest time in this area, and you need to prioritize this among other SEO priorities.