Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 1: 1:22

Hi, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, your host, as usual, and today, yeah, I'm just going to cover the latest news that Google are now linking to the Wayback Machine from their search results. Now, the reason they're doing this is because you know, until recently they used to link to a cached result for every page, every search result on the internet. On Google, you could basically see what version of a page Google had in its cache. So you could see this is the version of a page that's being indexed, because some pages can change frequently, some change less frequently, but they still can change, and obviously Google, with that cast result, was letting you see which version of a web page this indexing, this search result, was based on, so you could see if it was indexing an old version of the page, whether the page that was being indexed was the current live page on the website that was being indexed. So it's really useful to see, especially if you were developing a site and you're making changes to your site, whether any new search rankings you were seeing were based on your new version of a page or whether Google was still caching an old version of your page and whether you had to be patient to see whether those search results were coming through yet. Also good for if you're looking at competitors, to see if a competitor's current version of a page was the one that was driving those search results.

Speaker 1: 2:43

Now Google said that one of the reasons they had these cached pages wasn't for those SEOs being able to go and see whether the current version of a page was being indexed, so that we could sort of try and reverse engineer things. It was basically there for when the internet was a less reliable place, because you've got to remember, google dates back to the late 90s and those of us that do date back that far I know not all of you do, um, but those that are as old as myself do remember when the internet was a less reliable place, um, it was wasn't uncommon to find a website being very slow or even not available at all at times sometimes and google had those cached versions so that if your site result you were trying to you know you were trying to get to wasn't available, you could use google's cache version to see that page. So it's kind of like a bit of a fallback in case the internet's being rubbish for you at the time. So obviously the internet is now a much more reliable um place in general, although ever see some big sites sometimes do go down and all sites go down sometimes, but in general, yeah, much more reliable place. You're less likely to see, um, the need for looking at an old cache version just because the current site was down now, with that being the case that the internet's more reliable. Google, like we don't need to put the cache version anymore. We the current site was down Now, with that being the case at the Intersectional Reliable Google were like we don't need to put the cache version anymore, we're not going to display that link anymore. That was the reasoning they gave. Whether I believe them or not, I don't know, but that's the reasoning. But what they have done since taking away that cached version link in the search results, is they're now linking to the Wayback Machine.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Now, if you've never heard of the Wayback Machine, it's basically there's a project by a foundation called Internet Archive, who are available at archiveorg is their website archiveorg and what they do is they crawl the internet much like Google does and they take cached copies of websites and they make an archive of how websites evolve over time and it's a really great way of going back and seeing what any website looked like years and years and years ago. It goes back, I think, in some cases 20 plus years or more, depending. Obviously, if a website's not that old, it's not going to go back 20 years, only go back to when that website first existed. It can be quite interesting to see how some domains have expired, been re-bought, expired again re-bought, repurposed. You can see how domains have swapped hands over time and how sites have completely changed and how some sites have stayed under one ownership but have changed their design and their content and things over time.

Speaker 1: 5:21

So Google are now linking to this Wayback Machine from the search results and the way you find this is you go to any search, so do any search on Google and you'll notice next to all results obviously you normally get the sort of the favorite, the name of the website and the url. Um, you know that's the top of every search result and you'll notice there's little, three little dots next to that. If you click the three little dots it opens up, um, some extra information about the site. It gives you like an information panel and it tells you a whole bunch of stuff which won't go to all of them. But the second section is about the source and then at the bottom of that section there is a more about this page link. If you click more about this page it takes you to a sort of special search page and if you scroll down that you will see at the bottom just some information about when the site was first indexed by google and in the case I'm looking at, uswitchcom at the moment, it says more than 10 years ago, and there's a link to sit where it says see previous versions on internet archives wayback machine. If you click that it will open up for the url that you're looking at, a what's essentially a bit like a cached version of that page. It's going to get that latest version of the page cached in the Internet Archive, in the Wayback Machine, and just display it to you and it looks like you're on the site. Essentially it looks like you're on the website looking at the cached version of it but you are looking at from all the experiments I've looked at it is the latest version, the recent version of that current, that particular web page that the search result was for in the internet archive, which can in many cases only be, you know, a few days old.

Speaker 1: 7:03

I mean, the one I'm looking at here is the 18th of September. It says and I'm recording this on the 19th. So this was like, know, just over 24 hours ago this one was taken, and the more popular a site is, the more it's going to be crawled by the internet archive and the more often it's going to be hit. So you're going to get more recent ones, sort of more, sort of less popular sites. They're going to get crawled and they're going to get archived a lot less frequently. So it's interesting in a way, because it this link shows you what the latest version that's been saved on internet archive is.

Speaker 1: 7:39

Does it tell you anything about what google's up to, though? No, because we don't know when google last crawled and indexed any particular page. We don't know what cached version it is now working on. So it's interesting that they're linking, but it's not going to not going to tell us much. And it's also interesting that they don't just link. It would have been better if they linked to the um, a page on the internet archive where you had the calendar of all the times that it had been cached, because if you actually go direct to archiveorg you can type in any url and then they will come up with a nice page that shows you a calendar and on that calendar all the dates that they have cached and archived that page going back over time, so you can see a much better spread of versions and see how things have changed over time.

Speaker 1: 8:31

So how Google have done it, I think it's not that interesting. But what is interesting is that you can actually still get the version of a webpage that Google is caching, even though they're now not linking to them, from the actual search result. You can actually use the Google cache search operator to find, yeah, the cache version of any page. Now they have said that they are going to deprecate this at some point, so remove access to this command. They haven't done yet at the time of recording, so it's still available for you to use and it's quite simple to use.

Speaker 1: 9:08

You just go to open google, open up the search you know a search on google and you type in cash, which is c-a-c-h-e, so not cash money, it's c a, c, h, e, cash and then a colon, and then put in the full url that you are looking for the cash version of. So that includes the https colon, slash, slash. Then you know they're complete. So if you just copy it out of, if you go to google chrome, if you've got a web page in google chrome, just copy the url from the address bar in there and then type in cash colon and then just paste in the URL and you will see the version that Google has got for that web page. So that's hopefully got you up to date on where Google are with the cash and where they will and won't show you and how to find it, even though they're not linking to it anymore. Also, how Internet internet archives and the way my machine works, how to get to that and how you can actually use that to find previous versions of a website. So, yeah, that's you up to date on that and I look forward to seeing you in the next steps.

Speaker 1: 10:13

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.