What is a log file? And how to analyse log files? One of the best ways to observe Google’s real behaviour on your website is through log files. They offer helpful information for analysis and can support insightful optimisations and data-driven choices. Regularly analysing log files can help you find out what material is being crawled, how frequently, and other details about how search engines are using your website.
What is a log file:
Every request made to your server, whether by a user engaging with your website or by a search engine bot crawling it (i.e., finding your pages), is documented in log files.
Log files can provide crucial information regarding:
- When the request was made
- The IP address submitting the request
- Which bot (such as GoogleBot) crawled your website?
- The kind of resource being seen, such as an image or page
Depending on your preferences, applicable legal restrictions, and business requirements, servers normally save log files for a defined period.
What is a log file analysis:
What is a log file analysis and its uses? The process of obtaining and reviewing your website’s log files to proactively find bugs, crawling issues, and other technical SEO concerns is known as log file analysis. Examining log files can reveal how a website is seen by Google and other search engines.
In order to improve their SEO performance, SEO use log file analysis to gain a better knowledge of what search engines are actually doing on their websites.
You will waste a lot of time without learning anything if you don’t know what you’re looking at or what to search for while analysing your log files, which is similar to analysing Google Analytics data. You must have a certain objective in mind.
Why is log file analysis important:
These files are crucial to realising how crawlers are navigating your website because only log files reveal their actual behaviour. Search engine crawling is not accurately reflected by legacy crawlers or even monitoring platforms, they merely mimic what search engines perceive. Furthermore, Google Search Console does not disclose their crawling methodology.
Data from log file analysis can be used to enhance your site’s crawlability and, eventually, its SEO performance. This is because it explains in detail how search engine crawlers, such as Googlebot, move through your website.
Log file analysis:
- Find out which pages are most and least crawled by search engine bots.
- Check if your most critical pages are accessible to search crawlers.
- Examine your crawl budget if it waste time and resources crawling before moving on.
- Find technical problems that stop search engines from accessing your information, such as broken redirects and HTTP status code errors.
- Find URLs that have sluggish page speeds, as these can hurt your search engine rating.
- Find orphan pages that search engines might overlook, or pages that don’t have any internal connections connecting to them.
- Monitor increases or decreases in crawl frequency that could indicate additional technical issues.
How can you analyse log files:
If you have never performed log file analysis, it could appear difficult. To make the most of it, use our brief guide.
There are several methods:
Obtaining the log files for your website is the first step. Specialists can focus on the following concerns here:
- Data in log files may be dispersed among multiple servers, including origin servers and CDNs, necessitating compilation for a comprehensive picture.
- For busier sites, they might grow to terabytes, making transfer more difficult.
- Privacy concerns are raised by the presence of PII-like user IPs in these files.
You will find log files after connecting to your server with the FTP tool and authorising by entering your logging data.
Depending on the server type, you can see them in the following locations:
- IIS: %SystemDrive%\inetpub\logs\LogFiles
- Nginx: logs/access.log
- Apache: /var/log/access_log
Once you have the log files ready, it’s time to start analysing them.
Log files can be analysed in several ways. You can select one based on technical capabilities, time, and effort. The first is a manual analysis that may be done with Excel, Google Sheets, or any other handy tool.
However, there is a significant drawback: it takes a lot of time. Furthermore, weariness may cause you to miss things. Using tools made specifically for log file analysis is the better choice. They provide thorough reports after swiftly and effectively checking data.
When performing this task, you should focus on:
- HTTP problems and status codes
- Possible to waste the crawl money
- Pages that are orphaned
- crawling velocity.
You can improve your technical SEO by following the guidelines provided by these traits.
Improve your site crawlability:
What is a log file and how are they analysed? You are no longer perplexed by these queries, but you shouldn’t stop there. Improve the crawlability of your website.
- It guarantees that your website is easy for search engine bots to explore and index.
- The structure of your website will be easier for bots to comprehend, allowing them to assess the significance of individual pages.
- They will also promptly evaluate internal links, structured data, and meta tags for higher ranks.
- Regular log file analysis and thorough SEO audits can improve your site’s crawlability.
You can obtain a list of detailed suggestions for improving the speed and quality of bot site crawling by using a sophisticated tool.
Conclusion:
To understand what is a log file and its analysis and importance usage every aspect of it is discussed in this blog very clearly. Log monitoring has been around for a while, and your analysis process will need to change as search engines get more complex.
More sophisticated methods are needed than ever before to maximise your website’s visibility and performance. Real-time log file analysis has become an essential component in this changing environment. Gaining insight into your server’s requests helps improve the performance of your website and raise your rating.
This process is facilitated by tools which provide immediate and unambiguous recommendations for enhancing your website. Utilise it right now to enhance your technical SEO.
