Mistake: no crawl baseline, so you can't tell normal from a problem

Mistake: no crawl baseline, so you can't tell normal from a problem

Without a saved baseline, every "crawl drop" is guesswork after the fact. Hand-picked to fix it:

→ Google Search Central (crawl budget) — Crawl volume tracks site health and demand; only a trend tells you anything.
Takeaway: store daily verified-Googlebot fetch counts per section, indefinitely and cheaply.

→ BigQuery scheduled queries docs — Roll raw logs into a tiny daily summary table automatically.
Takeaway: keep the rollup forever even if you expire raw logs at 90 days.

★ Pick of the week — a 7-day vs 28-day delta query — Surfaces sections losing crawl before rankings move.
Takeaway: a baseline turns logs from forensics into an early-warning system.