You Think You Know What Google Crawls. You Do Not.
Every time Googlebot visits your site, your server logs it. The URL it requested. The status code it received. The time it took.
This is not theory. This is data.
And almost nobody looks at it.
What Log File Analysis Reveals
Which pages Google crawls most. Is it your important landing pages? Or is it burning crawl budget on your /wp-admin/ directory and filter pages?
How often Google returns. Pages crawled weekly are treated differently than pages crawled monthly. Frequency tells you how Google values each section.
Crawl errors you did not know about. Search Console shows some errors. Server logs show all of them.
Wasted crawl budget. You might discover Google spending 40% of its crawl budget on paginated archive pages nobody cares about.
How to Do It
Export your server access logs. Filter for Googlebot (verify it is real Googlebot, not a faker). Analyze which URLs are crawled, how often, and what status codes they return.
Tools like Screaming Frog Log Analyzer or JetOctopus make this easier. Or a simple Python script if you are technical.
What to Do With the Data
If Google is crawling junk pages: block them in robots.txt or noindex them.
If Google is ignoring important pages: improve internal linking to them. Add them to your sitemap. Build external links. Ahrefs has a solid technical SEO overview that covers crawl analysis in depth.
If Google is getting errors: fix the errors.
Simple. Powerful. Underused.
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