Automating Technical Reporting for SEO

Automating Technical Reporting for SEO – Moz

Moz logo

Menu open

Menu close

Products

Moz Pro

Moz Pro Home

Moz Local

Moz Local Home

STAT

Mozscape API

Free SEO Tools

Competitive Research

Link Explorer

Keyword Explorer

Domain Analysis

MozBar

More Free SEO Tools

Learn SEO

Beginner’s Guide to SEO

SEO Learning Center

Moz Academy

SEO Q&A

Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides

Blog

Why Moz

Agency Solutions

Enterprise Solutions

Small Business Solutions

Case Studies

The Moz Story

New Releases

Log out

Products

Moz Pro

Your All-In-One Suite of SEO Tools

The essential SEO toolset: keyword research, link building, site audits, page optimization, rank tracking, reporting, and more.

Learn more

Try Moz Pro free

Moz Local

Complete Local SEO Management

Raise your local SEO visibility with easy directory distribution, review management, listing updates, and more.

Learn more

Check my presence

STAT

Enterprise Rank Tracking

SERP tracking and analytics for SEO experts, STAT helps you stay competitive and agile with fresh insights.

Learn more

Book a demo

Mozscape API

The Power of Moz Data via API

Power your SEO with the proven, most accurate link metrics in the industry, powered by our index of trillions of links.

Learn more

Get connected

Compare SEO Products

Free SEO Tools

Competitive Research

Competitive Intelligence to Fuel Your SEO Strategy

Gain intel on your top SERP competitors, keyword gaps, and content opportunities.

Find competitors

Link Explorer

Powerful Backlink Data for SEO

Explore our index of over 40 trillion links to find backlinks, anchor text, Domain Authority, spam score, and more.

Get link data

Keyword Explorer

The One Keyword Research Tool for SEO Success

Discover the best traffic-driving keywords for your site from our index of over 500 million real keywords.

Search keywords

Domain Analysis

Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool

Get top competitive SEO metrics like Domain Authority, top pages, ranking keywords, and more.

Analyze domain

MozBar

Free, Instant SEO Metrics As You Surf

Using Google Chrome, see top SEO metrics instantly for any website or search result as you browse the web.

Try MozBar

More Free SEO Tools

Learn SEO

Beginner’s Guide to SEO
The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.
Read the Beginner’s Guide

How-To Guides
Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.
See All SEO Guides

SEO Learning Center
Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.
Visit the Learning Center

Moz Academy
Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.
Explore the Catalog

On-Demand Webinars
Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.
View All Webinars

SEO Q&A
Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.
Find SEO Answers

August 7-9, 2023
Lock in Super Early Bird savings for MozCon

Snag tickets

Blog

Why Moz

Small Business Solutions
Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.
Grow Your Business

The Moz Story
Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.
Read Our Story

Agency Solutions
Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.
Drive Client Success

Case Studies
Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.
See What’s Possible

Enterprise Solutions
Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.
Scale Your SEO

New Releases
Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.
See What’s New

New Feature: Moz Pro
Surface actionable competitive intel

Learn More

Moz Pro

Moz Local

Moz Local Dashboard

Mozscape API

Mozscape API Dashboard

Moz Academy

Avatar

Moz Home

Notifications

Account & Billing

Manage Users

Community Profile

My Q&A

My Videos

Log Out

By: Pete Watson-Wailes
November 22, 2016

Automating Technical Reporting for SEO

Technical SEO
|
SEO Reporting

The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

As the web gets more complex, with JavaScript framework and library front ends on websites, progressive web apps, single-page apps, JSON-LD, and so on, we’re increasingly seeing an ever-greater surface area for things to go wrong. When all you’ve got is HTML and CSS and links, there’s only so much you can mess up. However, in today’s world of dynamically generated websites with universal JS interfaces, there’s a lot of room for errors to creep in.

The second problem we face with much of this is that it’s hard to know when something’s gone wrong, or when Google’s changed how they’re handling something. This is only compounded when you account for situations like site migrations or redesigns, where you might suddenly archive a lot of old content, or re-map a URL structure. How do we address these challenges then?

The old way
Historically, the way you’d analyze things like this is through looking at your log files using Excel or, if you’re hardcore, Log Parser. Those are great, but they require you to know you’ve got an issue, or that you’re looking and happen to grab a section of logs that have the issues you need to address in them. Not impossible, and we’ve written about doing this fairly extensively both in our blog and our log file analysis guide.

The problem with this, though, is fairly obvious. It requires that you look, rather than making you aware that there’s something to look for. With that in mind, I thought I’d spend some time investigating whether there’s something that could be done to make the whole process take less time and act as an early warning system.

A helping hand
The first thing we need to do is to set our server to send log files somewhere. My standard solution to this has become using log rotation. Depending on your server, you’ll use different methods to achieve this, but on Nginx it looks like this:

# time_iso8601 looks like this: 2016-08-10T14:53:00+01:00
if ($time_iso8601 ~ “^(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})”) {
set $year $1;
set $month $2;
set $day $3;
}

access_log /var/log/nginx/$year-$month-$day-access.log;

This allows you to view logs for any specific date or set of dates by simply pulling the data from files relating to that period. Having set up log rotation, we can then set up a script, which we’ll run at midnight using Cron, to pull the log file that relates to yesterday’s data and analyze it. Should you want to, you can look several times a day, or once a week, or at whatever interval best suits your level of data volume.

The next question is: What would we want to look for? Well, once we’ve got the logs for the day, this is what I get my system to report on:

30* status codes
Generate a list of all pages hit by users that resulted in a redirection. If the page linking to that resource is on your site, redirect it to the actual end point. Otherwise, get in touch with whomever is linking to you and get them to sort the link to where it should go.

404 status codes
Similar story. Any 404ing resources should be checked to make sure they’re supposed to be missing. Anything that should be there can be investigated for why it’s not resolving, and links to anything actually missing can be treated in the same way as a 301/302 code.

50* status codes
Something bad has happened and you’re not going to have a good day if you’re seeing many 50* codes. Your server is dying on requests to specific resources, or possibly your entire site, depending on exactly how bad this is.

Crawl budget
A list of every resource Google crawled, how many times it was requested, how many bytes were transferred, and time taken to resolve those requests. Compare this with your site map to find pages that Google won’t crawl, or that it’s hammering, and fix as needed.

Top/least-requested resources
Similar to the above, but detailing the most and least requested things by search engines.

Bad actors
Many bots looking for vulnerabilities will make requests to things like wp_admin, wp_login, 404s, config.php, and other similar common resource URLs. Any IP address that makes repeated requests to these sorts of URLs can be added automatically to an IP blacklist.

Pattern-matched URL reporting
It’s simple to use regex to match requested URLs against pre-defined patterns, to report on specific areas of your site or types of pages. For example, you could report on image requests, Javascript files being called, pagination, form submissions (via looking for POST requests), escaped fragments, query parameters, or virtually anything else. Provided it’s in a URL or HTTP request, you can set it up as a segment to be reported on.

Spiky search crawl behavior
Log the number of requests made by Googlebot every day. If it increases by more than x%, that’s something of interest. As a side note, with most number series, a calculation to spot extreme outliers isn’t hard to create, and is probably worth your time.

Outputting data
Depending on what the importance is of any particular section, you can then set the data up to be logged in a couple of ways. Firstly, large amounts of 40* and 50* status codes or bad actor requests would be worth triggering an email for. This can let you know in a hurry if something’s happening which potentially indicates a large issue. You can then get on top of whatever that may be and resolve it as a matter of priority.

The data as a whole can also be set up to be reported on via a dashboard. If you don’t have that much data in your logs on a daily basis, you may simply want to query the files at runtime and generate the report fresh each time you view it. On the other hand, sites with a lot of traffic and thus larger log files may want to cache the output of each day to a separate file, so the data doesn’t have to be computed. Obviously the type of approach you use to do that depends a lot on the scale you’ll be operating at and how powerful your server hardware is.

Conclusion
Thanks to server logs and basic scripting, there’s no reason you should ever have a situation where something’s amiss on your site and you don’t know about it. Proactive notifications of technical issues is a necessary thing in a world where Google crawls at an ever-faster rate, meaning that they could start pulling your rankings down thanks to site downtime or errors within a matter of hours.

Set up proper monitoring and make sure you’re not caught short!

With Moz Pro, you have the tools you need to get SEO right — all in one place.

Start your free trial!

What Are A Href Links? HTML Links Explained

SEO FAQs and The 23 Most Asked Basic Questions About SEO

How Much Does That Keyword Cost? [TOOL]

10 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies & Tactics to Improve Sales

Links and Brand as Ranking Factors: 2021 Correlation Study

What Is CRM in Marketing? The Role of CRM and How to Benefit from It

类似文章