I recently hired a new SEO client who had a major problem. They had a very popular portal in a competitive industry, but for 3 consecutive months, their ranking of the top 10 search engines for the most important keywords had steadily plummeted. The position drops ranged from 1 or 2 places to 20 places. They hired me to try and address the issue quickly because their ad revenue was based on their brand’s top 10 visibility in the SERPs.

I looked for the usual suspects, a Google penalty, unreliable code, hidden text, new entrants, 404 errors, keyword stuffing, fast link acquisition, domain issues, major hosting outages, over-optimization, and over-code. Nothing – The site was checked clean. There was a major Google algorithm update in the last 6 months, but that happened weeks before the downtrend. I then asked about the design history and if any major changes had been made a week before the sudden drop in the rankings. The client didn’t remember any major changes, so I dedicated myself to improving the site as best I could and integrating a link building campaign to get links from high-quality sitelinks in the same industry.

But I couldn’t help but think that there must have been some major change to the site that affected its previously ideal search engine compatibility. So I asked for the site’s log files for the last 6 months and imported them into ClickTracks for a closer look. I found that the site was showing solid growth in traffic starting in February and continuing through April. It drew most of the traffic on April 5 and then suddenly collapsed. The records didn’t reveal much else except record keyword referrals for the period, followed by all-time lows.

It was then that the little lightbulb above my head lit up. You could use the Internet Archive to see what the site was like back then! If you are not yet familiar with the Internet Archive (affectionately known as the Wayback Machine), it is an online repository of websites in historical timeline format so you can see what websites looked like at different dates in their history. See the 2001 Wikipedia homepage layout: http://web.archive.org/web/20010727112808/http:/www.wikipedia.org/
It’s fun and a bit embarrassing to see what certain websites looked like many years ago.

So I took copies of the client’s home page from the file for the date range that coincided with the biggest rise and fall and studied the HTML for each one carefully. When I compared them, I saw an obvious difference. The earlier version contained keyword-rich link titles for the main navigation area, while the later version did not. The links were still there, but the link title attributes weren’t and a quick review of the client’s current homepage HTML showed they were still missing. Turns out, the web designer had inadvertently removed them during an update inadvertently and never replaced them.

Because the navigation area consisted of a large number of untitled links, the result was a drop in the homepage keyword density for the customer’s top target keywords, allowing your competitors to get higher. density will push them down the SERPs. I presented my discovery to the client and he was somewhat relieved to finally have an explanation. Link titles were re-established and customer rankings have been climbing ever since.

The whole experience got me thinking: the Wayback Machine really is SEO’s secret weapon. It’s Back to the Future SEO! These are just a few of the ways SEOs could use it:

1) To detect major HTML encoding changes on your own sites or client sites that may have affected rankings (based on my case study).

2) Study the layout and HTML history of your clients ‘and competitors’ sites.

3) Detect if a website has been optimized in the past.

4) Study the design and HTML history of the websites belonging to your main SEO competitors.

5) Detect if a website has used unreliable optimization tactics in the past.

6) To see what keywords your competitors targeted in the past compared to what they are now targeting.

7) Compare the design and usability changes made over the years by big brand sites (and emulate them).

8) To rescue HTML code and images for sites that have been hacked or deleted without backups in place.

9) To track content duplication or copyright violations when the site owner has already removed the offending material.

10) To verify the true age of a website and see if it has been used for a different purpose or business in the past.

These are just uses that occurred to me from the top of my head, but I’m sure there are many more. Some of these uses are not SEO specific, but are useful for webmasters in general and, in particular, for people looking to buy an existing domain.

Then there are the fun uses: embarrassing your peers by emailing them a copy of your old site complete with flashing frames and graphics. Laugh at the first designs released by some of the major search engines. The possibilities are endless.

So, what are you waiting for? Use the Wayback Machine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and Go back to the future!