Using Wayback Machine for SEO

Internet Archive launched a new tool called the ‘Wayback Machine’ under the URL archive.org, in 2001. The main objective of this tool was to build a digital diary of Internet history. This will help to make the content available for future generations of researchers, historians and scholars. This data is also valuable for marketers and SEO professionals.

The Wayback Machine is a useful tool to view how your website looked in the previous versions. You can see the URL from any website and check how they have come since the early days of the internet.

To use this tool you can put your URL in the search box of Archive.org and choose a date where you think the code may have changed. The cached pages from the archive will get loaded into your browser with a header from Archive.org. You can open the source code of the page and compare it with the current website.

Understanding the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a tool that stores historical snapshots of websites. 

This is useful for SEO because owners can see their websites' development. They can see the older version of their pages. If you want to optimise your website then you can hire an SEO service in India.

You can use the Wayback Machine to improve your SEO strategy as follows:

• The snapshots from the Wayback Machine can be used to compare a website’s rendered appearance on different dates. This will help you to determine the cause of the drop in the rankings. You will be able to find out what changes may have affected the ranking negatively. You can fix this problem.

Leveraging website history for SEO

This will help you to identify trends and patterns that you can use to improve your current SEO.

• To offer solutions to a new client you need to familiarise with their website. You can use the Wayback Machine for this purpose. You can see how the website has changed over the years. You can talk about the changes to the client. For those who are working on branding and content creation this can be very useful.
  
  
• Find old redirect opportunities with this tool. You can find old URLs that existed at a time on the site which may need a redirect after years of changes. Use Wayback Machine with Screaming Frog to make a list URLs and check their status codes. You can find old URLs which were never redirected to the live versions. You will not be able to discover it otherwise.
  
  
• When you change the URL structure of your website the old structure is forgotten. This can cause problems while pulling data. You can use the Wayback Machine if you remember when the changes were made. You can find what were the changes done and what the old structure used to be. You can map the old URLs with the new counterparts.
  

The Wayback Machine indexes everything it finds on the website including the robots.txt file. If your website is facing crawlability or technical issues then you can find the date when those changes causing the issues were made to the robots.txt file. You just have to use the Wayback Machine and search for the robots.txt and compare around the time the problem started.

During website migration you can use this tool to get the old version of the robots.txt file if you do not have the original version of the file and the file has changed.

Leveraging website history for SEO

It crawls the robots.txt file too therefore you can see the older versions of this file and get information you may have lost during the website migration.

The Wayback Machine helps you to understand what type of changes your competitor has made to their content. You can get valuable information while doing competitive analysis. You can use tools like Diffchecker to find the differences in the content.

Leveraging website history for SEO

This tool can also be used to analyse the competitor’s SEO strategies. You can access the previous versions of their website and see what changes they have made over time. You can find the keywords and the content they have used in the past. You can use this information to enhance your website’s SEO.

You can use this tool to identify the lost links on your website. You can identify pages that used to have links but do not have them now. You can use this information and reapply the links to improve your SEO. It will also help to improve your user experience.

If you have restructured your website then it may result in broken links, pages not accessible anymore and other issues. You can use this tool to identify issues and fix them to improve your SEO.

You can use this tool to find out if there is a drop in referral traffic from a key source. You can review the source’s website and find the reason for it.