In Defence of Log Files

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In Defence of Log Files Beth Woodcock @bethwoodcock speakerdeck.com/bethwoodcock

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LOG FILES

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LOG FILES Scared?

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LOG FILES Scared? Confused?

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LOG FILES Scared? Confused? Angry?

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LOG FILES Scared? Confused? Angry? Intimidated?

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LOG FILES

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LOG FILES?

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Bots request to see your site? They leave ‘footprints’ (logs) on where they have been!

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No footprints? There’s a blockage! Think of what will happen to your content…

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Log ﬁles have a NEGATIVE REPUTATION in the SEO industry…

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IN DEFENCE OF LOG FILES!

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Hi, I’m Beth I’m a Senior Technical SEO Executive I’m not from a technical background I want to make log ﬁles accessible to everybody.

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But Beth, why do you care?

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Without log ﬁles, SEO is a guessing game

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How long do you wait for Google… Weeks? Months? Years?!

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An actual technical SEO manager told me this “In order to download log ﬁles, you need to buy a data server as the ﬁles are too big for a regular laptop”

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An actual technical SEO manager told me this “In order to download log ﬁles, you need to buy a data server as the ﬁles are too big for a regular laptop”

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I do log ﬁle analysis on my laptop with no access to a data server

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You can safely delete ﬁles from your computer when they are imported into the program, saving space!

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We often import several Gigabytes worth of uncompressed log ﬁles without issue The larger the time frame you request data for, the more events that have to be considered, and the slower the response will be - ScreamingFrog Website

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Monthly ﬁles are around 600MB On average 10k URLs crawled a day, with 650,000 crawled every month Regular log ﬁle analysis carried out

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“In order to download log ﬁles, you need to buy a data server as the ﬁles are too big for a regular laptop” An actual technical SEO manager told me this

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“In order to download log ﬁles, you need to buy a data server as the ﬁles are too big for a regular laptop” An actual technical SEO manager told me this

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“Log ﬁles are too difﬁcult to get. Our clients won’t give them to us”

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“Log ﬁles are too difﬁcult to get. Our clients won’t give them to us”

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HAVE YOU ASKED?

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I have asked, and I have to ask EVERY MONTH

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FileZilla Your PC Client PC Drag and drop!

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Direct from their server ‘LOGS’

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There are also very technical coding alternatives if you’re interested in that.

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“Log ﬁles are too difﬁcult to get. Our clients won’t give them to us”

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“Log ﬁles are too difﬁcult to get. Our clients won’t give them to us”

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“Log ﬁles look too complex. It’s up to the technical SEO team to deal with that”

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“Log ﬁles look too complex. It’s up to the technical SEO team to deal with that”

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Why are you looking at the matrix

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GA4

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Log ﬁle analyser

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If you produce any content for a website, you should know how to use log ﬁles

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Making sure Google can see new pages

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Redirects? New links? New content? What’s the impact?

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A case study on why a technical audit should always be completed before any other SEO process

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The log ﬁles for the site had the /news/ section missing It turns out the template was making the /news/ section take

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14 SECONDS to load

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We had evidence of the correlation between long load times and crawling. No guesswork needed here!

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“Log ﬁles look too complex. It’s up to the technical SEO team to deal with that”

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“Log ﬁles look too complex. It’s up to the technical SEO team to deal with that”

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“My client uses Shopify, so I cannot access log ﬁles”

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“My client uses Shopify, so I cannot access log ﬁles”

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Only a small amount of information, not the whole logs (especially for big sites)

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If there’s specific URLs you’re looking for it will be difficult to find them!

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Can only see Google’s bots, nobody else’s

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Log ﬁle analysis can be done on a laptop

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Clients are often willing and knowledgeable enough to give you the log ﬁles you ask for

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There are alternatives to asking for log ﬁles every month

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NOW GO OUT AND DEFEND LOG FILES!

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@bethwoodcock /in/bethanywoodcock/ aip.media Beth Woodcock Been working in SEO for 3 years with a speciality in technical SEO. DISCLAIMER: No AI was used in this presentation… apart from DALL-E, Photoshop generative ﬁll, Upscayl and Mid Journey. Oh, and Chat GPT to generate this disclaimer…