Log File Analysis

Why It Matters

Log file analysis provides the only complete picture of crawler behavior - what they request, how often, what errors occur, and what they ignore. Critical for large sites to optimize crawl budget, identify indexing problems, and ensure important content gets crawled regularly.

How It Works

Server logs record every request to your site including crawler visits. Analysis involves parsing logs to extract crawler activity (Googlebot, Bingbot), identifying crawl patterns, spotting errors (404s, 500s), measuring crawl frequency per page, and correlating crawl activity with rankings or traffic changes.

Use Cases

• An e-commerce site discovers Googlebot wastes 40% of crawl budget on faceted navigation URLs, implements robots.txt fixes
• A news site identifies important articles not being crawled, adjusts internal linking to improve discovery
• A large site finds crawl errors on new content, fixes server configuration to improve indexing speed

Best Practices

• Analyze logs monthly for large sites (1M+ pages) or quarterly for smaller sites
• Focus on Googlebot activity primarily, but monitor other major crawlers
• Identify and fix pages getting crawled frequently but not ranking (wasted crawl budget)
• Find important pages not being crawled and improve their internal linking
• Monitor server errors (500s) that prevent crawler access to content
• Use log analysis tools like Screaming Frog Log Analyzer, Botify, or OnCrawl for automation