To enhance the SEO performance of their websites, search engine optimizers (SEOs) often research the log files stored on such websites to get a better knowledge of what search engines are doing on those websites.
Analyzing the data in your log files is similar to analyzing the data in Google Analytics. If you don’t know what you’re looking at and what to search for, you’ll waste time without gaining any practical knowledge. You really must have a target in mind.
Why is analyzing log files so vital to search engine optimization?
These files are critical to understanding how crawlers explore your site since they are the only ones that reflect the genuine activity of crawlers. This is something that happens relatively frequently:
Legacy crawlers and monitoring platforms of the best digital marketing agency in Dubai merely give a simulation of what search engines view; they do not provide an accurate depiction of how search engines crawl.
To be clear, Google Search Console does not provide any information on the crawling process.
By analyzing log files, for instance, you might find out about significant problems like the following:
- Inconvenient priorities for search engine crawling: your logs will show you which sites are often crawled. You’ll also often notice that search engines spend a significant amount of time indexing pages with little to no value, which is particularly common with huge websites.
After that, you will be able to take action and modify aspects of your website, such as the robots.txt file, the internal link structure, and the faceted navigation.
- 5xx errors: your log files assist in discovering 5xx error response codes, which you may then use as a starting point for follow-up investigations.
- Orphaned pages are pages that do not belong to the structure of your website and do not have any internal links leading to them from other sites on your site. This means that the majority of crawl simulations will not be able to find these sites, and as a result, it is simple to forget about them.
If they are being crawled by search engines, this will be reflected in your log files. And wow, those search engines have a good memory; they “forget” about URLs very seldom.
You will then be able to take action, such as incorporating the orphaned pages into the site structure, redirecting them to a different location on the site, or deleting them outright.
What is the meaning of a log file?
A log file is a text file that contains records of all of the requests and replies that a server has received, both from people and crawlers. These requests may come from either humans or crawlers.
When we speak to “the request” in this article, we refer to the request that a client sends to a server. This is consistent throughout the essay. The answer that is sent back by the server is what we will refer to henceforth simply as “the response.”
Always be making adjustments to your digital marketing Dubai if you want to be successful with search engine optimization.
It is essential to include log file analysis as part of your continuing SEO monitoring efforts, considering all of your constant adjustments to your website. You should go through the use cases discussed above and set up alerts if your log files reflect unusual activity coming from Google.