Importing these log files in to the Screaming Frog Log File Analyser is simple: just drag & drop the files in to the main window when you start the tool for the first time.
You’ll quickly learn if this is sufficient data to work with, or if you’ll need more. To start with, I’d recommend taking log files from the most recent complete month and start analysing from there. Log files covering too short a timeframe won’t give you much meaningful insight, but if you analyse too large a time period your analysis will be very slow and could suffer from overwhelming amounts of data. These are often stored on the webserver in the /logs/ or /access_logs/ folder, and you can use FTP to download these files on to your computer.Īs server log files can get very large on high-traffic websites, it’s important to select an appropriate date range for your analysis. Importing Log Filesįirst of all, you’ll need your website’s server log files. I’ve been fortunate enough to have tried the Log File Analyser in beta, and now that it’s publicly released I can’t wait to share with you some of the incredible uses this tool has.
This new tool is the Screaming Frog Log File Analyser – sibling to the well-known staple of any SEO’s toolbox, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Now, however, we have a new tool at our disposal, one that is specifically designed from the ground up to help SEOs make use of log files. This forgotten knowledge is now being rediscovered. Some old school SEOs never stopped looking at log files, and I reckon these people are more than slightly bemused by the renewed attention on log files as a source of SEO insight.Īs I’ve been delving in to server log files once again these last couple of years, I’ve been relying on tools like Apache Log Viewer to extract useful insight from server log files.
Along the way, we forgot how log files could be incredibly useful for other purposes. When JavaScript-based analytics arrived on the scene, log files were quickly abandoned and we focused on the new, shiny reports that tools like Urchin and Omniture could produce. Personally I have to admit I didn’t pay a lot of attention to log files for many years. Early in my career, log files were all we had when it came to analysing a website’s performance, and we used tools like AW Stats to serve as rudimentary web analytics. This excellent guide to log file analysis from BuiltVisible is a great place to learn more about it. Log file analysis has been making a comeback in recent years in technical SEO, as more and more SEOs realise the power of delving in to a website’s server log files.
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