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Take these Broken Links…

(With apologies to Mr. Misterir?t=bigcajunstore 20&l=as2&o=15&a=B0021UDK4K ) Man, when I decided to clean up the mess that is THE Canadian Personal Finance Place, I had no idea how much bloody work this was going to be! Broken links galore!

Evidently with the new Google algorithm, lots of broken links are a big No-No, so when I started my clean up I used a Broken Link Plug In and it said I had over 900 broken links (that it could find), so I have spent countless hours remedying that situation, but it now has me thinking:

Broken Links
Damn Broken Links
  1. Carnivals are a problem once the post is over 6 months old (especially the Carnival of Personal Finance which is just too darn big), because inevitably links die off, when folks change their sites! I have spent countless hours cleaning up that mess, but it has me thinking that maybe I don’t want to host any more carnivals. I guess another useful tool might be one that looks at a post and the rank of the sites and posts in the carnival so you can trim out old useless links.
  2. My weekly Friday post which includes links to a whole bunch of other sites for the week is yet another headache, because things change, and there are countless stale links in those posts too! Also when I change anything on these posts I fire out hundreds of link messages to these sites, so I must be really popular with those folks too.
  3. When Stats Canada moved their site, it screwed up a TON of my posts, and they seem to remove information older than a few months as well

This is making me think that I may need to rethink my whole link-building concept, because part of it needs to be the constant maintenance of these links as well.

The other interesting thing I found out this week, is thanks to being put into Google’s Penalty Box, I got an e-mail asking me to REMOVE COMMENTS from a bunch of my articles, by a fellow blogger. I was not linking to his site(s), he left comments, however, I guess Google’s new algorithm takes into account whether you leave comments on “naughty sites” like mine. I have removed a few of the comments, but that is a bit much to ask (IMHO). Maybe it is time for me to start charging for this service.

This whole thing is quite interesting, but now I am thinking that as part of my duties for running my site I am going to have to add in “site maintenance” every week to keep things, “fit and trim”.

There are countless broken link plugins for your WordPress site. Broken Link Checker works very well. If you do not clean up broken links your site will appear to have been abandoned. Clean it up.

What do you think?

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