Webpages

911 · Post by **911** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 9:11 pm

Is there anyway to tell how old a webpage is? When it was first initiated?

Just because it shows archives several years old or hit counters, does that mean it could be new and just showing stuff like that? And what if it doesn't have a hit counter?:-3

Richard Bell · Post by **Richard Bell** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 10:09 pm

Go to www.archive.org

Enter the URL into their "WayBack Machine".

You'll get links to all the archived front pages of that site, divided by years and months.

Here are the archived pages for forumgarden.com :

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/forumgarden.com

911 · Post by **911** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 11:06 pm

Cool!

Thanks :-6

You're the best!

Post by **spot** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 11:31 pm

There's an absolute cut-off earliest date for the creation of the domain itself. No page on forumgarden.com can be older than May 2004 because that's when forumgarden.com was created. You'll find shown that at, for example, http://whois.domaintools.com/forumgarden.com

Registry Data

Created: 2004-05-22

and you can use that lookup with any domain by changing the second half of the address.

What you can't do with this test, or with Richard's, is know the age of the content of the webpage if the webpage has been moved to its present address from an older one. All you're doing so far is checking the history of the URL, not the history of the content. If you can pick what looks like a unique bit of the webpage's content that's less than ten words long you can google it to see if the content's got a wider distribution and consequently a longer history somewhere else.