Almost five years ago I wrote an article about predicting a site’s future and using your expectation to decide whether you should pursue links on that site today. Much has changed in the search engine optimization (SEO) landscape since then so I decided to expand and update my original article.
Sometimes, what’s old is old
It’s interesting to run into sites we’ve worked with in the past and compare their previous and current metrics. Lots of things pop up like:
Old links are still live but the host page is full of new links whereas it wasn’t before.
Pages that once ranked well no longer do so.
Articles with links that were not originally there have been added.
And sometimes everything is the same, though, if not better!
A look into the past
It’s easy to determine what a site looked like in the past and compare it to the current site by using Archive.org.
You may notice a lot of changes such as good and bad redesigns, deleted links and entire articles removed. Occasionally you may notice whole sites deindexed in Google:
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