Posted on April 17, 2008
Web Time Travel - Going Wayback for Optimization
BY BEN CASTELLI
I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the WaybackMachine over at archive.org which allows you to browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. While it may be fun to see how far Apple has come in the past 11 years or how little McDonald's (holy redness!) has come, there are actually some practical website optimization and search visibility insights that can be gained from using the tool.
First off let's talk about website optimization. By using the Wayback Machine you can see a timeline of web design, navigation, content, on page seo etc… over the sites history. Coupled with website analytics (like bounce rate) and conversion data over the same period, you are able to get an idea of what worked and what didn't. For example, we recently had a pay per click client who had periods of strong online conversions several years ago, however were unable to get back up to that level in recent months. By reviewing the archive of their site, we discovered that during the high conversion months, the home page had a much different color and placement of their call to action buttons. Now there are many other factors that can impact conversions, but incorporating the previous color and placement of the CTA buttons into a new home page design helped generate over a 50% increase in conversions.
In terms of search engine optimization the Wayback Machine is a great resource to view the history for your site (or competitors) and discover how on page optimization changes have affected search engine rankings and traffic. You can often discover major coding changes or shifts in keyword targeting that have a big impact on rankings. One example was a client seeing a major competitor creeping up the search engines results out of nowhere for highly competitive keywords. "How are they doing this?", we were asked. Through the Wayback, we discovered that the competitor had an entirely flash home page up until a few months prior to their rise in rankings. With a new, well optimized non-flash home page, keywords in the URL and good website longevity, their ranking quickly increased.
The Wayback Machine is fun to play around with to check old sites, but keep it in your tool box for researching search visibility or website optimization for your own site or that of your competitors.
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thanks dan, you got man, being able to tag ALL of your marketing efforts and analyze the data for actionable insights is key.
You can often discover major coding changes or shifts in keyword targeting that have a big impact on rankings. One example was a client seeing a major competitor creeping up the search engines results out of nowhere for highly competitive keywords. "How are they doing this?", we were asked. Through the Wayback, we discovered that the competitor had an entirely flash home page up until a few months prior to their rise in rankings. With a new, well optimized non-flash home page.
Ben: Good post - I'll have to try the WayBackMachine. I've been blogging about how to leverage your web metrics ( You may find a recent post of mine of interest http://spellman.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/how-high-can-yo.html ). Having the ability to leverage your web analytics tools and see the actual pages from prior month's marketing efforts, enables marketers and merchants to build an better understanding of what has driven success (and what has not).