Besides cloning expired sites (being sure to buy the rights to stay legal, of course; hat tip Stephan Spencer), Archive.org has plenty of uses. Here are some I’ve considered.

1) Has the ownership of the site changed? Whois is not the be-all end-all. If Google can destroy sites’ SEO based on radical changes in content, well, perhaps you’d be best advised to know whether that’s happened before based on large differences in content.

Why do you care? Because past history will affect the site’s trust in the SE algos. Slapped before, it’s probably more likely to get nailed again in the future. Otherwise, your leash is a little longer.

On a related note, my subscription to the premium drops tool (I was testing it out, hat tip to Todd Malicoat, if memory serves) just renewed automatically. I hate when that happens. So: If you want to research any dropping domains/make some purchases and you’re not ready to buy the service yet, let me know what data you want and I’ll get it for you, free - don’t spend your money. If you’re a serious player, you might want to consider my website buying services instead though.

2) What was the page’s old URL before we launched the new site? My online jewelry client Ice.com recently relaunched with a new backend and while we work out the kinks, analytics still need to be used to direct strategy. Knowing what the former URL for the checkout, category or product detail page was can come in handy!

3) Was this test already run before? If you keep the same landing page URLs, for example, you can look at the old ones before you signed a new client to avoid duplicating work that’s already done. Some organizations keep good records, others have people relying on the memory of an inhouse expert or agency. When one or the other goes … there’s no one to answer the question. Note: This works better if the page is indexed. Of course, you can do this for all tests, not just landing pages.

* Lesson to the wise: Don’t be reliant on one-two people to track what you’ve learned over time from testing. You paid for that knowledge and should have access to good records explaining:

• What was done: e.g. 2 headlines and 3 hero pics for 6 total variations),
• Why that test was run: e.g. to see whether emotional or logical appeals mattered most and whether beauty or strength or product features mattered most, visually
• What the results were: combo x converted best
• Hypotheses to explain the results: people buy pens based on price; people buy pens based on comfort grips, multi-color changers and fancy packaging (features)
• Next tests to verify those hypotheses.

Note: My friend Claude Malaison of Emergence Web suggests that internal blogs can do serve this purpsoe for ‘internal memoir / archive” for an organization in his chapter of “Why Businesses Should Blog” (”Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires”), a 10-chapter book with as many authors.

Also, the Internet Archive created Archive It, an archiving service that can perform this function for you. Use their contact form to get a quote/get started. Sadly, their usability is not the greatest and there’s no clear call-to-action or obvious pricing page or anything you’d expect/want from a site trying to sell you something. Ironic, I know.

Like this ‘big ideas‘ post? Get my rss feed already, sheesh!

Subscribe to SEO ROI Services' RSS Feed
Curious why you should subscribe? The best reason I can give is that you'll find original ideas here. On a related note, if you need SEO services, here's where to get more information.

I’m looking for some landing pages to be designed and coded up as Wordpress pages. Why? So that I can grow my network of idea distributors. Go join the fun!

In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, (more…)

There are about 2.5 million executable files in Google’s index:
“Results 1 - 10 of about 2,470,000 for filetype:exe” - http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Aexe. (more…)

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

David Mihm - web designer and local seo extraordinaire - recently asked me to participate in his local SEO ranking factors survey. And it got me thinking as to how a search engineer might consider the usefulness in ranking sites of any particular factor. Let’s see what the thought process in this part of a search engineer’s workday is like. (more…)

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency - most people place it around 7 times - for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have!

“Do we credit the first click or the last click for this conversion?”

(more…)

Ok, I’ve actually been to SMX Advanced, where I spoke, celebrated my 21st birthday, during which I devoured delicious homemade cake (thanks mom!), been helping Ice.com Jewelry fix their SEO issues, which meant auditing and now planning implementation, and handling other stuff too besides!

After regaling you all with the wonderfully exciting tale of what I’ve been up to for the past week and change, I feel I should also clarify that Google maps guide Jen has suggested a solution (more…)

At SMX West (yes, West; I’ll talk about the awesomeness that was SMX Advanced soon), one of the most interesting things I learned was that an advertiser who spent $30,000 on banners saw a 20% lift in branded search. When you consider how well branded search converts, that’s good news, especially if that demand lasts (for the caveats on measuring true branded search ROI see “What Every SEO Needs to Know About Branded Search“). This post is going to explain how you can use the link graph to get similar lifts in your branded search, (more…)

Big ideas and food for thought:
(more…)