How to find out when a site was last updated?

Marky · 27 Mar 2012 at 12:47

Hey all,

There was a forum I used to visit many years ago, and it has since been taken down. Today, I thought I'd check out to see whether there was anything on the site, or whether it was completely gone.

It turns out there is a splash page saying "Coming Soon", and so I wonder when that was updated last. (I.e. I wonder if it was updated a year ago, and it really isn't "Coming soon"

)

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks,

Marky

GravyMonster · 27 Mar 2012 at 12:52

You can't really. Your only hope is to check the google cache of the site, or possibly the internet archive, but this will only give you a rough idea of what state the pages were in when they were last spidered.

Marky · 27 Mar 2012 at 13:05

Ahh that's a shame... The Google Cache has a snapshot of the site a week ago (And it was the splash page), but that's it

matja · 28 Mar 2012 at 09:08

If it is a static page, the "Last-Modified" HTTP header may be set by the web server to reflect the modification time of the HTML file. Some web browsers show the HTTP headers in the developer mode, or you can use something like "wget --server-response http://site.com"

Example on one of my sites :
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:07:27 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:01:32 GMT