The Wayback Machine is a fun little tool to go back in time and see what old, archived web pages looked like at one time. If you would like to see some of your old web pages or those of a competitors or for a website you’re about to buy, you can check it out on the Wayback Machine.
In an odd legal turn of events, though, the Wayback Machine was used in a lawsuit to prove copyright and now, is itself being sued. According to the New York Times, “The Internet Archive was created in 1996 as the institutional memory of the online world, storing snapshots of ever-changing Web sites and collecting other multimedia artifacts. Now the nonprofit archive is on the defensive in a legal case that represents a strange turn in the debate over copyrights in the digital age.”
Healthcare Advocates is suing the owners of the Wayback Machine under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act since the Philadelphia law firm, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey used the Wayback Machine to prove their case against them. Healthcare Advocates is saying that access to their old web pages is “unauthorized and illegal.”
For those who use the Wayback Machine outside the legal profession (such as historians, SEO’s, web businesses and other interested parties, etc.) this has chilling implications for the future of the popular Internet tool. This setback for Wayback hopefully will be resolved in such as way that the Wayback Machine can continue to be used for its original purposes, which is for entertainment purposes only and not as a tool for endless copyright lawsuits which will naturally lead to its demise.
Does Google use your Alexa rank as a key ranking factor? Well written article. Thanks.
Google doesn’t reveal the 200+ indicators for their algorithm but it is common thought in the SEO community that Alexa ranking is taken into account.