Alibris is an online store that sells new books, used books, out-of-print books, rare books, and other media through an online network of independent booksellers.

Due to the nature of Alibris’ separate mobile and desktop configuration, it was not possible to emulate how Google crawls the website – a step fundamental to the SEO process. We were tasked with determining how often the website (both mobile and desktop) was being accessed by various web crawlers and agents (including Google’s own web crawlers), identifying historical trends and providing Alibris with actionable recommendations to improve their website’s performance.

We started by partnering with Incubeta London and South Africa to produce a server log report. From here we used Google’s BigQuery database to store processed data from CloudFlare.

Once we were able to gain access to the client’s Web Server Logs, we went about ‘cleaning’ their data to be compatible with BigQuery. Once the logs were imported, we then had to familiarize ourselves with the CloudFlare API, and write a script that checked CloudFlare every 5 minutes and imported the latest log events.

We now had a real-time database of server events, with historical data going back to July 2019. With the data in place, we connected it to DataStudio and worked with the SEO team to create a final report.

Knowing that high volumes of raw log data would be difficult to interpret, we processed the data so that it could be presented in a digestible manner through dynamic charts and tables. This allowed us to better analyze the data which would inform our SEO strategy and way forward.