OK as promised I ran the dead-links checker tonight and I waited, made a coffee, ate some flapjack, waited some more and returned to my laptop 30 or so minutes later as it completed this task. I guess I should be impressed with the results (actually I genuinely am as doing this manually I’d get through a ton of flapjack!), but also slightly overwhelmed by what was returned! (I also tried Xenu – similar results but its quicker).
I thought my blog was relatively small, however the results showed I had 155 pages/blog entries with 414 external links of which 84 could not be reached. Not good I thought, but if you do run this tool I’d check the results carefully as some of the links I felt sure should still exist, and indeed they did (no doubt the crawler sent my router into ‘mild flap’ mode resulting in some errors due to time-outs). After discarding these and removing some duplicates this left around 30 links which I should take action on … or should I? Obviously a couple that link to a misspelling of www.changeup.org.uk needed to be altered along with someones email address that had changed, but some of the rest, I’m not so sure.
Why? Well these were live posts relevant back at the time when they were written – in the heat of the moment. Are our blogs statements made at a point in time, or should they be 100% accurate for ever more. I’m in the camp that says old blog posts should never be updated, yes we sometimes write drivel or make statements that could have been better researched, but the slightly rough nature of a blog is what makes it a good blog – we’re not looking to win literary awards! Anyway do readers even go back over old posts (do I read back copies of newspapers?)
I hear what’s said about SEO but I need to give this some thought (and your comments are welcome too!).
I guess I may fix a couple of links, may remove some links (to events that have happened) and the others I think may get left.
Finally, this wouldn’t always help our motorist of yesterday … but then would our motorist follow a sign to event that took place back in January …. ?
Filed under: BB31Days, Blogs I read a lot, nptech, nptechuk
Paul,
Good question about whether to update the event links. I hadn’t even thought about people taking down the pages, but after running Xenu, I see they have.
I ran it on the ASTD-Cascadia blog first, which started in mid-June, and it already had broken links. My first reaction is to change the links to the sponsoring organization’s homepage when available.
I also see I need to be careful not to type in double http://.
[...] Paul suggested that we use Dead-Links.com and Xenu to locate broken links within posts that I tested. I tried Dead-Links but most the links it indicated were broken [...]