How We Manually Review web.archive.org

A big signal of trust a website can have is its own online history. web.archive.org ("The Wayback Machine") is an online archive that takes snapshot caches of each domain through the years, so you can "go back" and see what a website looked like in the past (and the content it hosted) by viewing those snapshots. We manually check each website we review via web.archive.org just to check out its history. It has to be a manual job to see what kind of content has been hosted on the domain through the years.

It gives us a good picture of the history of any given domain name. Some domains are used by DIFFERENT companies through the years (bought and sold), others maintain the same owner/company. If we review a site that has a domain that's "old" (5 years +) that also contains consistent content by the same company throughout that lifetime of the domain, it's a great signal of trust if coupled by the other signals of trust too.

However, it doesn't mean that new sites are necessarily at a disadvantage because we do look at a lot of different signals to determine how trustworthy a site is.