SOP 45: Wayback Machine vs. Live Crawl — Auditing Site History

SOP 45: Wayback Machine vs. Live Crawl — Auditing Site History

The live site shows today. You are buying its past too. Use the right archive tool.

— Use the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to detect three red flags: a niche/topic switch (was it a casino last year, a recipe blog now?), a recent design overhaul masking thin content, and prior expired-domain ownership.
— Use a live crawler (Screaming Frog) for present-state: broken links, redirect chains, orphan pages, and total indexable URL count versus what the seller claims.
— Combine them: pull Wayback snapshots at 6-month intervals for 3 years. A clean, consistent niche = lower risk. A 404-then-revived pattern = expired domain rebuilt, treat backlinks as suspect.
— Check trap: if Wayback has gaps the seller cannot explain, the site may have carried a manual penalty (deindexed period).

Pass criterion: stable niche and ownership signal across 3 years of snapshots.

Save this — run it every deal.