The success and fulfilment of your SEO efforts depend heavily on your ability to understand how search engines and users interact with your site. This will consequently help boost your rankings, bring in targeted visitors, and increase conversions.
Google’s crawl bot has a duty when it visits a website to crawl a certain number of pages and save them to the search engine’s database as automatically created log files on your server. Every technical and on-page audit must include a log file assessment because it reveals which areas of your site attract the most attention from users.
What Is a Server Log Analysis?
A study of your log files will help you identify the areas that require attention and development and can assist you in achieving your more ambitious objectives.
Server log analysis is a study of data demonstrating how website crawlers, particularly Googlebot, perceive and engage with your pages.
There are unique pieces of information in every log file. They are essential records that show who is visiting your website and are routinely saved on your web server.
Using Server Logs to Measure How Google Crawls and Indexes Web Pages
In the section below, we’ll go over various approaches to log file analysis and how to use the findings for search engine optimization.
1. Look at Your Crawl Budget
The crawl budget refers to the number of your website’s pages that the Googlebot crawls in a specific amount of time. Pages that have not been crawled won’t be indexed by search engines, which means they won’t be ranked.
To put it another way, Google won’t display it in the relevant search results pages. You may end up with unindexed pages if the total number of pages on your website surpasses your crawl budget.
Your crawl budget, however, could occasionally be squandered on unimportant and low-value pages, preventing certain useful ones from getting indexed and ranked. Use the server logs to determine where you can improve by removing irrelevant content.
2. Mobile Friendliness
Google began using mobile websites for ranking and indexing in July 2019. Since most internet users now conduct their searches on smartphones, it makes sense that Google would modify its practices to enhance the user experience and provide the most accurate and relevant search results.
You must optimize your site for mobile devices to ensure that all your essential pages are crawled, indexed, and ranked promptly.
3. Identify Code Response Errors
Additionally, you can utilize a log file analysis to find code response issues such as 4xx and 5xx, which might harm your rankings.
Client errors, often known as “Page Not Found” or “The site or page couldn’t be reached” problems, are coded as 4xx. These 404 errors will prevent proper crawling.
5xx errors, often known as server errors, indicate that the user made a valid request but that the server could not fulfill it. By identifying these errors, you can fix them to improve rankings.
Final Thoughts
To help your web pages rank well in search results, you can use server logs to identify your website’s weak areas that need improvement. You can use the tips above to take advantage of the information server logs provide.