A brief note about Wayback Machine’s past
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. It was created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, based in San Francisco, California. The service enables users to go through the archived versions of a number of web pages over a long period of time. Wayback has a credible history of archiving cached pages of websites since 1996. Usually, they visit different websites after regular time intervals and save the versions at the time.
The way back machine’s basic idea was to document the evolution of a website that might either be lost or forgotten over time. This tool, however, also comes in handy when you are forming your SEO strategy. Here’s how:
You can view changes in websites’ over the years.
One of the most obvious ways via which the Wayback machine helps in boosting your SEO is to view the development of a website over time. Apart from that, it can also help you skim through the changes of an industry leader’s site and learn from their advancement.
You can compare snapshots of the site on different dates and evaluate the changes. This will help you a great deal while creating your own website since you will already be aware of the determinants that attracts the customers. You can also access and inspect the ranks of a website during a particular time period. If done carefully, this analysis will put you in a far better position than your competitors
Get to know about a client’s brand development
When dealing with a new client, you will most likely want to get a clear idea of their company’s history to cross-check the credibility of your prospect. With the Wayback machine, you can easily visit your client’s website and inspect their archives to evaluate the phases that their company has surpassed.
Their initiation and development over the years will give you a desired edge in the future dealing since you will be aware of their basic brand voice. You can also back out of the arrangement if you feel like the company’s brand is not that popular among your customer base and trade with them might take a hit on your own business.
Understand site structures of websites
The Wayback Machine helps you see what the past structure and classifications of a website looked like. This feature comes in handy in those times when you might come across data of a site that appears to be diluted, but this dilution might have actually been caused because of the page consolidation or expansion. If you go through the way the site was structured in the past, you’ll easily be able to put a finger on which pages might have been recently consolidated into different categories or expanded to separate pages.
You can easily perform a Marketing Mix Analysis
The machine is also a great tool for analyzing different channels to landing pages’ combinations and how they change as the company gains popularity. For example, a particular channel to draw customers served really well during the last two years but recently, despite expanding the channel’s outreach, you are not being able to draw in the same percentage of customers.
To solve the mystery behind such a problem, you will need to take a look at your landing pages in the Wayback machine, examine various combinations of keywords and landing pages over time and reckon the success of each. Based on these observations, you can develop a new strategy that will help you attract the same percentage of customers, maybe even more.
Your pathing analysis research can be made more in-depth.
The pathing analysis is important for your business to grow. You need to take an in-depth look at your pathing analysis and the Wayback machine is here to lend a hand! This tool will enable you to easily compare a path that you are seeing at the present period with the way it appeared in a previous time period to witness the elements that have changed and how it has affected you.
This feature can also help you discover multiple CRO opportunities for different page layouts for your website. You can look through the conversions on your site at different points in time and figure out the reasons why your conversions numbers were at a high for a given period and vice versa. These will help you in determining the most desirable layout for your website which will attract the maximum number of customers.
Despite all these benefits, the Wayback Machine is still not reliable!
Hundreds of websites are coming up on the internet every year. With this increasing number of websites, the need for archiving websites is also witnessing a constant rise. However, the Wayback Machine is failing to cope with the rapid changes in the millions of websites across the web. Even earlier, the machine failed to archive the lesser-known webpages.
Now, however, the number of webpages that the machine is failing to archive is increasing tremendously. Plus, the Wayback Machine is not customizable and cannot be personalized – two features that are most desired by people to increase the efficiency of their SEOs. While the Wayback Machine is a brilliant tool to witness the growth of web pages since the beginning of the internet and also view changes in some of the most popular websites of today, there is no denying that we need to use more reliable software to archive websites. There are hundreds of alternative tools of the great archive machine available on the internet, each with its own pros and cons. Out of them, my personal favourite alternative tool is Stillio because of the unending number of benefits it has to offer to its customers.
Stillio is much more consistent in archiving websites as it takes regular screenshots and organizes and stores it in a convenient and appropriate way.