Pete Wailes says, “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 knowyou’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“.

Automating Technical Reporting for SEO

MOZ

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