Internet Wayback Machine Adds Historical TextDiff
The Wayback Machine has a cool new feature for looking at the historical changes of a web page.
The color scale shows how much a page has changed since it was last cached & you can select between any two documents to see how a page has changed over time.
You can then select between any two documents to see a side-by-side comparison of the documents.
That quickly gives you an at-a-glance view of how they've changed their:
- web design
- on-page SEO strategy
- marketing copy & sales strategy
For sites that conduct seasonal sales & rely heavily on holiday themed ads you can also look up the new & historical ad copy used by large advertisers using tools like Moat, WhatRunsWhere & Adbeat.
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Comments
Hey Aaron, I've been addicted to this feature since Archive.org rolled it out about a month ago.
In addition to what you described in your post, I have one more use-case to share: seeing how a page's structure has changed over time.
If you see a page that suddenly jumped a few spots for a competitive keyword, it could be because they overhauled the page to better match search intent. With the the "before" and "after", you can see exactly what changed (more content, less content, list post vs. tips, or just an update to an outdated piece).
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