Spring Cleaning in Autumn

It’s no longer spring but it’s always worth spending some time tidying up your website. In this article I am going to show an easy way to clean up the dead articles on your site which will increase the overall quality of your posts, and stop any SEO leakage you might have.

Recently I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin and it has helped me tidy my site up quite nicely. It has actually allowed me to do 2 things.

1. Remove dead links from the site.
2. Remove old, underperforming content.
3. Refreshing/ Repairing broken content.

Remove Dead Links

The purpose of ‘Broken Link Checker’ is to do just this. It scans posts, and comments for links and then pings them to see if they are still functional. Running it the first time took a long time but after a couple of hours I had a list of over 500 links to check.

Cleaning these links took me even longer but I feel the time was well worth it as I now have a much cleaner website, keeping more of the page rank on my domain and ensuring that my websites content is tight and well performing.

Removing Old Posts and Refreshing/ Repairing content

A lot of the links that were removed come from post content that is linking to old websites that no longer exist. Linking to non existent websites is bad for your users, and means you are leaking page rank. What I did with the knowledge varied depending upon the content. In some cases I deleted the posts entirely, and in others I searched for new, fresh articles, on the same subject to change the links to content that is more worthy.

Finding the dead links also helped me to find old posts I had forgotten about which, sometimes, gave me a chance to improve the content making it more worthwhile to those who read it.