Log File Analysis: What Googlebot Actually Does
The only way to see real crawler behaviour rather than inferring it.
Technical SEO
What logs reveal
Which URLs Googlebot requests, how often, in what order, and what status codes it receives. Search Console shows aggregates; logs show reality. The gap between them is frequently where the problem lives.
Common findings
Large crawl volume spent on parameter URLs, faceted navigation, or paginated archives. Important pages crawled rarely or never. Redirect chains consuming double the requests. 404s being repeatedly requested from stale internal links.
When it is worth doing
Sites above roughly 10,000 URLs, sites with faceted navigation, and any site where important pages are not being indexed despite being technically fine. Below that scale, the effort rarely pays back.
Key takeaways
- Logs show real crawler behaviour; Search Console shows aggregates
- Faceted navigation is the most common crawl-waste finding
- Redirect chains double the request cost per URL
- Worth doing above roughly 10,000 URLs
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