Using Way Back Machine for SEO Research

Have you heard of the Way Back Machine by Alexa?  In a nutshell, it’s an archive of the internet and you can use it to view how websites looked over time. 

If you have some time to spare, try it out on some of your favourite websites to see how thy looked “way back” when.

Once you’re done, come back here and read about how you can use the way back machine to research what your competition  are doing in terms of SEO and site design.

Back already?  Excellent, now lets begin.

As I said above, you can use the way back machine to spy on your competitors seo and site design activity. 

Using the way back machine has to be done in conjunction with your serps monitoring.  When you notice that a new site has achieved the number one psition, you can use the way back machine to view the source code of the site before it achieved the number on position and compare it with the source code of the site after it has achieved the number one position.

By doing so, you’ll be able to see what your competition has done (onpage factors) to improve their position.  Note how I specified on page, that is because there are also offpage factors (link popularity) that influence where your site ranks.

I hope this tip was helpful, if you have any q’s, fire away…