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2. Checking a site's history<< Return to start of due diligence - Places like the internet archive are invaluable in your research. This "wayback machine" will usually show you how the site looked in the past. Check out not just the home page but historical content of other pages of the site too. Handy trick: Truncate the URL and replace with your chosen page. Replace the "newsite.com" in http://web.archive.org/web/*/newsite.com and replace with "newsite.com/links.htm" http://web.archive.org/web/*/newsite.com/links.htm or whatever other page you want to research. Notice any seedy or illegal material? - If it's a site that sold goods or services check for feedback forums where the site/company may have been discussed. - Try the site's name in some searches to see what gets thrown up. Follow some of those search results and have a browse through the context in which this site keeps getting mentioned. - If the site has a unique IP you may want to check if that IP was associated with some illegal/adult or other content you wouldn't like to be associated with. If it was used for a link farms that's a particular problem as it takes a while to shake off the link farm reputation. - You can also get some idea of how a site looked in the past by looking at cached versions of their pages. Search engines are good places to find cached versions. A site:www.newsite.com in Google will bring up a list of pages Google has for that site. True, most of the cached versions are likely to be fairly recent but searches at other search engines who don't crawl as frequently as Google does may throw up some surprises. |