Wednesday, June 8, 2022 – How to find out how long a website has been online – How to manually run a full virus scan with Microsoft Defender

How to find out how long a website has been online

Unfortunately, the Internet is chock full of fraudulent and otherwise malicious websites.

Although it’s far from fool-proof, the length of time that a website has been up and running on the Internet can be a valuable clue to it trustworthiness.

Scammers will often create a new site and use it to scam unsuspecting folks in some way.

They hit the scam fast and hard, hoping to rake in as much ill-gotten cash as possible before complaints start flooding the email Inbox of the site’s web hosting company and the site gets shut down.

Then the scammer simply builds another new site with another new domain name and repeats the process all over again.

The takeaway here is that scam sites don’t usually last all that long. In fact, if one lasts a year that’s a pretty decent “lifetime”.

While not all recently-created websites are fraudulent, a great percentage of fraudulent websites are relatively new.

So how can you find out how long a suspicious site has been online? Here are a couple of tips…

First, you can check to see when the domain name was registered. Here’s how:

1 – Click here to open ICANN’s official “Domain Data Lookup Tool”.

2 – Type (or copy and paste) the website’s domain into the search box, then click the Lookup button.

Note: A site’s domain will be something like example.com. You can get the domain by looking at the site’s URL in your browser’s address bar.

After your search is complete you should now see a record of that domain’s registration data. Look for the “Dates” section.

The date you’re looking for is the “Created” date. That’s the date on which the domain was first registered. If that date is less than one year prior to today, that’s a huge red flag because it means the site is likely less than one year old.

But there’s an important caveat to using just the creation date of a site’s domain name as an indication of how long the site has been online.

Many domain names are registered and then “parked” for quite some time (often years in fact) before the owner ever gets around to creating a website for that domain.

What does that mean? Well, a fairly recent “Created” date means the site is almost certainly new, but a years-old “Created” date could mean the site is either old or new.

So how can you tell the difference?

Well, the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine” caches copies of the web pages on most every site on the Internet in its database. You can search that database and “look way back” and see how a website has evolved over time.

But the Wayback Machine can also help you determine how long a website has been online. Just follow the steps below:

1 – Click here to visit the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine”.

2 – Type (or copy and paste) the URL of the target site’s homepage into the search box, then press the Enter key on your keyboard.

You should now see a calendar listing the dates on which new pages for that website were cached and added to the Wayback Machine’s database.

Near the top of the screen should be a line saying something like “Saved XX times between [first date] and [second date]“.

That first date is the date on which the very first page from that website was cached and added to the Wayback Machine’s database.

If that first date is less than one year from today’s date then the site is almost certainly new, and therefore not as trustworthy (in my humble opinion) as an older site might be.

So there you have it. Now you know how to use two awesome tools in tandem to determine the relative age of most any website.