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Back to the Future SEO
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007

Recently I took on a new SEO client who had a major problem.
They had a very popular portal site in a competitive industry
but for 3 months running, their Top 10 search engine rankings
for major keywords had taken a consistent dive. The position
drops ranged from 1 or 2 places up to 20 places. They hired me
to try and address the issue quickly because their advertising
revenue relied on the top 10 visibility of their brand in the
SERPs.

I looked for the usual suspects, a Google penalty, dodgy code,
hidden text, new competitors, 404 errors, keyword stuffing, fast
acquisition of links, domain issues, major hosting outages,
over-optimization and code bloat. Nothing - the site checked out
clean. There had been a major Google algorithm update in the
past 6 months, but that had occurred weeks earlier to the
downward trend. So then I asked about the design history and if
any major changes had been made a week or so prior to the sudden
ranking drop. The client couldn't recall any major changes so I
went about the business of improving the site as best I could
and integrating a link building campaign to obtain links from
high quality sites in the same industry.

But I couldn't shake the idea that there must have been some
major change to the site that impacted its previously ideal
search engine compatibility. So I asked for the site's log
files for the past 6 months and imported them into ClickTracks
for a closer look. I discovered that the site showed a solid
growth in traffic starting in February and continuing until
April. It was attracting the most traffic on April 5 and then it
suddenly plummeted. The logs didn't reveal much else, except
record keyword referrals for the period, followed by record
lows.

It was then that the little light bulb above my head switched
on. I could use the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/)
to see what the site looked like on those dates! If you aren't
already familiar with the Internet Archive (affectionately known
as the Wayback Machine), it's an online repository of web sites
in historical timeline format so you can see what web sites
looked like on different dates in their history. Check out
Wikipedia's front page design from 2001 (http://web.archive.org/
web/20010727112808/http:/www.wikipedia.org/). It's fun, and a
little embarrassing, to see what certain web sites looked like
many years ago.

So I pulled copies of the client's home page from the archive
for the date range that coincided with the major spike and fall
and studied the HTML code of each carefully. When I compared
them, I saw one glaring difference. The older version contained
keyword-rich link titles (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/
links.html#h-12.1.4) for the main navigation area while the
later version didn't. The links were still there, but the link
title attributes were not and a quick check of the client's
current home page HTML showed they were still missing. It turns
out that the web designer had inadvertently removed them during
an update without realizing and never replaced them.

Because the navigation area consisted of a large number of
untitled links, the result was a drop in the home page keyword
density for the client's major target keywords, allowing their
competitors with higher density to push them down the SERPs. I
presented my discovery to the client and they were somewhat
relieved to have an explanation at last. The link titles were
reinstated and the client's rankings have been climbing back
ever since.

The whole experience got me thinking: the Wayback Machine is
really the SEOs secret weapon. It's Back to the Future SEO! Here
are just some ways SEOs could use it:

1)    To spot major HTML coding changes on your own sites or client
sites that may have impacted rankings (as per my case study).

2)    To study the design and HTML history of your client's sites
and their competitors.

3)    To spot if a web site has been optimized in the past.

4)    To study the design and HTML history of the web sites
belonging to your major SEO competitors.

5)    To spot if a web site has used dodgy optimization tactics in
the past.

6)    To see what keywords your competitors targeted in the past
versus the ones they now target.

7)    To compare design and usability changes made over the years
by big brand sites (and imitate them).

8)    To rescue HTML code and images for sites that have been
hacked or wiped without back-ups in place.

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

10)    To check the true age of a web site and see if it has been
used for a different purpose or company in the past.


These are just uses I came up with from the top of my head, but
I'm sure there are plenty more. Some of these uses are not SEO
specific, but useful to webmasters in general and particularly
to persons looking to buy an existing domain.

Then there are the fun uses – embarrassing your mates by
emailing them a copy of their old site complete with frames and
blinking graphics. Having a laugh at the first designs rolled
out by some of the major search engines. This
(http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http:/www2.yahoo.com/)
is what Yahoo looked like in 1996. Here's
(http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http:/www.google.com/)
Google in 1998. The possibilities are endless.

So what are you waiting for? Use the Wayback Machine
(http://web.archive.org/) and Get Back to the Future!
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Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine
optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and
respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as
running a daily Search Engine Advice Column
(http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm), Kalena manages
Search Engine College (http://www.searchenginecollege.com/) - an
online training institution offering instructor-led short courses
and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization
and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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