Rant: That old guy on a forum told me to use Wayback Machine instead of Screaming Frog for dead link checks and I argued with him for an hour

Back in 2019 I was working on a site audit for a client in Austin. Had a ton of dead internal links from an old blog migration. This user named something like "linkguy_2001" on a webmaster forum kept saying to use Wayback Machine to grab old URLs instead of running Screaming Frog for the 100th time. I thought he was nuts. Why would I manually dig through cached pages when I could just automate it? Well after 3 hours of Screaming Frog giving me 404s with no context, I tried his way. Found the old article slugs in like 20 minutes. He was right. Still bugs me that I wasted that whole afternoon. Anyone else ever blow off good advice because it sounded too old school?

2 comments

2 Comments

parkerrodriguez1d ago

My buddy spent a whole day fixing a site before someone told him he could've used the Wayback Machine in ten minutes.

the_joel1d ago

Oh man, that's brutal. My friend Sarah spent like four hours rebuilding a whole WordPress site from scratch after a hosting crash. She was literally crying at her desk until her brother walked by and was like "uh, you know the Wayback Machine has your old site cached, right?" She still brings it up every time someone mentions backups.