Technical SEO Prompts (Log Files, Regex, Hreflang)

By Amit Patel

Technical SEO prompts have less tolerance for confident-sounding wrong answers than content prompts do. A hallucinated blog intro is embarrassing; a hallucinated regex pattern or canonical recommendation can break a live site. These prompts lean on the model’s strength — explaining and drafting — while keeping verification in your hands, not the model’s.

Log File Analysis

Paste sample log lines (with any sensitive IPs or paths redacted) rather than describing them:

• “Given these log lines [paste sample], which of these requests are from Googlebot vs. a spoofed user-agent, and how would I verify that?”
• “What does this pattern of repeated 404s in my logs [paste] suggest about broken internal links or an old URL structure?”
• “Given this crawl frequency breakdown by directory [paste/describe], which sections is Googlebot under-crawling relative to their size?”

Regex and Rewrite Rules

• “Write a regex pattern that matches [describe URL pattern] but not [describe exception] — then explain what each part of the pattern does.”
• “Review this .htaccess rewrite rule [paste] and explain exactly which URLs it redirects and which it leaves untouched.
• “Convert this Apache rewrite rule [paste] to the Nginx equivalent.”
• “Does this regex [paste] have a catastrophic backtracking risk on long input strings?”

Hreflang and Canonicals

• “Review this hreflang set [paste] for missing return tags — every page should reference every other language version, including itself.”
• “Given these URL variants [paste: with/without trailing slash, with/without www, with UTM parameters], what canonical tag should each point to?”
• “Explain the practical difference between rel=canonical and a 301 redirect for this duplicate-content scenario: [describe].”
• “Given this hreflang code [paste], is ‘x-default’ being used correctly for the language-neutral fallback?”

Crawl Errors, Plain English

• “Explain what this Search Console error [paste exact error text] means, in plain English, for someone who isn’t a developer.”
• “What are the 3 most common causes of ‘[error type]’, ranked by how often each actually turns out to be the cause?”
• “Given this robots.txt [paste], would it block Googlebot from crawling [specific URL], step through the rule matching.”

Guardrails

Never deploy a regex pattern, rewrite rule, or redirect the model generates without testing it against real sample URLs first — including edge cases and URLs it should NOT match. Ask the model to explain its own pattern back to you in plain English as a sanity check; if the explanation doesn’t match what you intended, the pattern is wrong even if it looks plausible.

Frequently Asked Questions