Wayback Machine - is a well-known and useful service that allows you to see all the sites in the form in which they existed in the past, but this is not the only useful function Wayback Machine - service can be used in internet marketing.
- Tracking Site changes
This is the main function Wayback Machine. Site Pictures (snapshots) Wayback Machine can be used for comparison of the site at different times, to see what has changed.
Even if a few shots Wayback Machine site (usually it happens not very popular sites), you can still determine the date of any change. This is useful if you think that the changes could be the cause of the fall of the website in the search results, look at the version of the page at the time, after which there was a drop in and find out what kind of negative changes it caused. Use this data to correct the problem.
- Introduction to the website
When you are working with a new client, it is important to be familiar with its website and to understand the intricacies of its brand. Wayback Machine help you with this. You can see how the site has changed over the years and how the brand has changed the policy. Check with the customer change: "Before you said one thing and now another, is not it?".
- Search for the previous redirects
One good way to use the Wayback Machine - search URL, which after some time hung redirects. This often happens with large brands, sites which started work in 90 or early 2000, and then were converted in accordance with the requirements of search engines. To find older versions of references and check their status code, use the Wayback Machine is paired with the Screaming Frog is .
- Search for the old URL structure
Sometimes the sites URL structure is changing, and the old is lost. If you know the approximate date of the change link structure, you can use the Wayback Machine, to find out exactly when changes were made and looked like the former structure. Then you can compare the newer version of the reference to the previous. This feature is useful if the content of a site has been reorganized or subsections were renamed.
- Study of Robots.txt
Wayback Machine indexes all that are on the site, including the robots.txt file. And it's great: if your site has a technical vulnerability, you can see exactly when changes were made to document a robots.txt, which led to these vulnerabilities. All you need to do - is to find a robots.txt document compare data slices pages at different dates up until you find the cause of the vulnerabilities.
- Checking the counter intelligence
Wayback Machine indexed pages source code and allows you to keep track of the changes that were made to him. Enter the URL of the page, select the date and site photos, which you need, and click to view the source code and assess how well it is made.
- Analysis of the customer's journey
If you want to carry out a full analysis of the client's path, with this you can also help the Wayback Machine. By using this service, you will be able to compare the current path length in order, which was in the past to determine what stage have changed over time. Wayback Machine also opens ways to increase conversion. If conversion on your site was high in a certain time, you can look at the previous layout, buttons and links on the page to determine how they affected the conversion.
- Determination of the structure of the site
Wayback Machine shows how in the past looked the hierarchical structure of the site. Sometimes sections may be combined or vice versa to break into several pieces. If you look at it, what was the structure of the site in the past, you can tell which pages were recently combined into one category or separated into independent.
If you need to download the page or the site entirely, here is a useful addition for those who can and loves to code: download the historical version of the site, use this script to the site GitHub .
- Find the old content
Wayback Machine helps you find old content that has been lost or accidentally deleted. Just open the page that contains the content at an earlier date.
See also: How to give a second life content: 12 ways to spice up your best articles
- Conduct a mixed marketing analysis
Use the Wayback Machine, you can analyze the growth of traffic landing pages. Suppose that in the context of last year worked well, but the result of this year is not so impressive. Look at your landing page using the Wayback Machine, to find out which keywords are yielding results, and what has changed on the number of pages has led to a decrease in the effectiveness of these keywords.
Back to the Future
At first glance, Wayback Machine - it's just a service, showing an earlier version of the website is really "time machine" of the Internet. However, its function can be useful in the field of internet marketing. And what uses of Wayback Machine comes to mind for you?