How to Use ELK for Technical SEO Server Log Analysis with Drupal

Asaf Yigal

DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics. One reason is that server log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how search engines are crawling one's website.

If a search engine spider encounters an error and does not load a page, the webmaster does not know because traditional traffic analytics tools such as Google Analytics do not track those issues. Log file data, on the other hand, does reveals what problems bots are encountering on a website – and many of those issues can hurt a site’s appearance in Google.

Too many response code errors can lead Google to cut the rate at which it crawls your company’s website. You want to monitor and confirm that search engines are crawling everything that you want to appear in public search results (and everything else should be blocking search engine bots). When pages are assigned new URLs, it’s important that the redirection will refer incoming links appropriately.

In this session, we will show how to use the increasingly popular open-source ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) for server log analysis with Drupal in a technical SEO context.

What level of knowledge should attendees have before walking into your session

A basic understanding of the ELK Stack and technical SEO is helpful but not necessary because this talk will introduce these concepts for beginners before then going into intermediate-level topics.

What attendees will learn​

  • An introduction to the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana components of the ELK Stack

  • Use cases: How DevOps teams can use the ELK Stack

  • How to install the ELK Stack and use it specifically to monitor server logs

  • How to create a Kibana dashboard to monitor important technical SEO items including bot crawl volume, response code errors, temporary redirects, crawl budget waste, duplicate URL crawling, crawl priorities, last crawl dates, and crawl budgets

  • How to address those technical SEO errors

[Reviewing team: For more detail on what would be presented, you can see this extensive blog post on our website about the topic.]

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Session Track

DevOps

Experience Level

Intermediate

Drupal Version