The Best WayBack Machine Alternative

The wayback machine at archive.org has recently made changes and as a result it had me and my team scrambling to find an alternative.

Archive.org has been a key part of my processes for a few years! It along with MajestiSEO.com is(was) the best source to review a site to see if it had been abused.

The WayBack machine now only shows the history for live sites. Meaning if a domain is expired it will simply give an error. My hope is this is a bug with the new site and it will be fixed shortly but for those of us that are finding clean expired domains an alternative is needed!

The reality is that there is no really suitable alternative for Archive.org and the waybackmachine! If you are having issues with using the site check to make sure it is working for others using this tool and maybe wait a few minutes or try a different browser. Although the problems I have often run into haven’t been limited to the site being down but simply the screenshots not working.

Hope these alternatives are helpful!

Archive.is

Archive.is or Archive.org is the best free alternative but its quality is not very good compared to Archive.org!

Archive.is provides a more visual representation of the site and you are also able to set your site to record screenshots of it at a given time.

It can be used over Archive.org for the purposes of seeing the design of an older site.

 Pros

  • Free alternative
  • Shows a better visual representation than archive.org

Cons

  • Not Free
  • Site is only an image and can’t not see destination of links
  • Does not show the functioning website (no code)
  • Sometimes the image is too low of resolution to read text/anchor text
  • Does not have as good of historical coverage as archive.org

ScreenShots.com is the best alternative but has been included inside the paid DomainTools.com offering

There are many alternatives however most of them focus on providing a service of monitoring pages you select moving forward (such as Stillio.com).

We need something that will show how a site looked historically and ScreenShots.com will do this.

shots

 Pros

  • It shows exactly how the site looked including images
  • Has very good historical coverage compared to any other alternative
  • Shows additional DomainTools information in a handy reference window

Cons

  • Not Free
  • Site is only an image and can’t not see destination of links
  • Sometimes the image is too low of resolution to read text/anchor text
  • Does not have as good of historical coverage as archive.org

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