After 2000 posts, go back and do an inventory of what the heck you have written and that in itself is turning into a daunting task for THE Canadian Personal Finance Site, that is for sure. I am astounded by how much I have written about 6 years and even more surprised by how crappy some of these posts are.
What started this was I installed a plug in that looks for broken links and I have many hundred of those, so I figured it was high time I went back through my archives to see what was back there.
So my cleaning up has started to include:
- Cleaning up and/or wiping out all broken links (that is going to take a very long time at the end of it all).
- This causes me to look at many posts, which helps with the other tasks I have started to take on.
- Finding a few weird posts, I did near the beginning of my blogging career, where I went to sites to get stock content. What a load of codswallop that stuff is, they have all these crappy links back to things, so those are being deleted with great impunity.
- This includes some weird posts that I did early on for ReviewMe and a few others. What I was thinking then I don’t know, but holy cow, what a load of crap.
- I also looked at some of my older posts, which were just slapped together and not of very high quality. I am listing those to see whether I may delete them, rewrite them, or reuse the thematic premise. I am not sure; I will see. I don’t want to delete these since they are great examples to look at and try not to emulate.
- It is essential to remove as many photos on my site as I do not have publishing rights to. I don’t publish that many images, so there aren’t many, but having a photo I don’t have the right to use, is just a headache looking for somewhere to hit. I’ll delete them, although I have linked to them many times, so the link is already dead.
- Many of my posts have leftover metadata and tags from when it was hosted by Google on Blogspot, so it never hurts to clean those out. The problem is that sometimes, my auto-publish Twitter plug-in pumps them into my Twitter feed. You need to watch for that one. I wonder what Google does with this info when it wanders through my feed? It never hurts to clean up bogus data.
- This also allows me to use the
All in One SEO plug-inRank Math to tweak things for some posts. Always a good idea, to try that stuff out. It is there. You may as well use it. - Finally, it allows me to clean up some nasty tricks I may have included in my younger age before I got smacked down by Google (yes, even old folks try to get ahead).
I may think of a few more things to clean up, but for now, that is my essential list of things to get done, and any new ideas that might pop into my head.