Describe how you would use log file analysis on a large ecommerce site with millions of URLs.
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Collect logs and filter to verified Googlebot
- Measure crawl frequency by section, template and status code
- Find crawl waste on parameters, facets and redirects
- Compare crawled URLs with important and indexable URLs
- Fix issues: robots rules, internal links, sitemaps, server errors
- Monitor changes over time
Model answer
First I would get at least a few weeks of server or CDN logs and filter them to verified Googlebot, using reverse DNS or Google's IP ranges, because many bots fake the user agent. Then I would analyse which sections and page templates Googlebot crawls, how often, and which status codes it receives. On large ecommerce sites I usually find crawl waste: huge numbers of hits on filter and sort parameters, internal search pages, redirect chains or old URLs. Next I would compare the crawled URLs with our list of important, indexable pages, such as key categories and in-stock products, to find pages Google rarely or never visits. Fixes might include robots.txt rules for low-value parameters, better internal linking to deep pages, cleaner sitemaps, and fixing 5xx errors or slow responses. I would keep monitoring logs to confirm Googlebot shifts its attention to valuable pages.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.
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