Search engine optimization tools come and go. But two have been around for decades and remain essential and free: Wayback Machine and Google cache.
Both take recurring snapshots of billions of web pages and allow anyone to view the images.
Those images are handy for general research, but they are invaluable for SEO, helping understand a page’s history and what may have caused its boost or decline in rankings.
Both tools, incidentally, allow website owners to prevent the archiving of their pages via meta tags: noarchive (for Wayback Machine) and nocache (for Google cache). Not many sites use those tags, but if you cannot locate a page in either archive, that may be why.
What follows are three ways Wayback Machine and Google cache can help your SEO.
Wayback Machine, Google Cache
Identify changes on the page. In 2019, Wayback Machine launched a helpful feature: the ability to compare two versions of the same page.
It’s useful for many SEO tasks, such as diagnosing a traffic decline in your own site and analyzing a competitor’s increase to reverse engineer.
To access and compare pages:
- Insert the page’s URL in Wayback Machine.
- Click the “Changes” button below the search field.
- Select two dates in the calendars beneath and click “Compare.”
Selecting a date (such as before a competitor’s rankings boost) is not typically obvious. Google’s algorithm is often slow to react to pages changes. A rankings increase in April, for example, may result from a page change in January. Thus...
Read Full Story: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/seo-using-wayback-machine-google-cache
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