What to do about Old Posts?

By Ian, on March 17th, 2010

old typewriter

Your old stuff — the stuff you wrote before, even your best stuff — mostly turns bad. It always did, but the Internet remembers. The churl.

Most people don’t bother about it. I, however, am foolish.

I’ve recently started using the Broken Links Checker plugin on this site. It finds the articles and sites you’ve linked to that don’t exist anymore. I did it because had a feeling that there was a need for some curation of my old articles:

It seems like a bad service to readers to send them to content that you know isn’t there. If you click on a link that says ‘Ten things about X’, and you only get five, because the rest of it has disappeared, then you’d be disappointed, I’d suggest. Probably a bit annoyed with the person who sent you.
I’m told that Google regards broken links with a stern eye and downgrades you accordingly. I want to be found (still need a new job, people!) and so this seems like a squandered resource.
There’s a sense of personal and professional hygiene to this. They may have link-rot, but dammit, I don’t.

Anyway, I ran it and it found about 300 broken links in old posts.

Drat.

In a lot of cases, the broken link didn’t matter – it was just a case of extra information that wasn’t essential to the heart of the piece. Nonetheless, I get annoyed when I click on something and it doesn’t work; I expect you do, too. It wouldn’t be right to just leave it there.

In some cases, it ruined the whole article:

Check out this research report – I think that… [Except the research report isn’t there any more and so readers have nothing to go on].
Cool video from XYZ – pass it on… [Not so cool when it doesn’t exist anymore or has been removed].

So what to do about this?

Maybe, in an ideal world, I’d go back and either (a) find the Internet Archive cache of the old file and re-link it or (b) rewrite the post to explain exactly what the report said or what was so cool about that video, so seeing it didn’t matter.

But that isn’t going to happen: if I had extra time to spend on this blog, it would be to create more new posts, not fool about with stuff from four years ago.

So back in the real world, my options are (a) delete the post; (b) brief note of explanation; © ignore it; or (d) unlink the link.

I’ve mostly gone for (d) unlinking. In some cases, I have deleted: hey, check out this cool video you can’t see.

Shouldn’t you delete the post when the evidence or source no longer exists?

No. Because there’s this whole permalink thing to blogger culture. If you wrote something, then it should be there forever. We made a break with the ever-breaking links of other media outlets and decided that these records are set in stone. Links disappearing every five minutes was a bad phase for the Internet and we made the right decision. I agree with all of that, except if it means that something useless is there forever, because I was linking to a source that couldn’t care less about that whole idea.

And also, I have sinned enough. I have a confession to make. I changed the permalink structure of this blog a few weeks ago, rendering almost all inbound links useless. [Short version — I got some bad SEO advice that killed server performance — see this for good advice]. Mea culpa. If I knew more about WordPress and search when I started, I would have done it better.

Hehe. You were so dumb in 2006.

Another consideration. I certainly was (am). A lot of my early posts are naive and sometimes stupid to my and your 2010 eyes (not saying that never happens anymore). Should I wipe them to make me look cleverer? No. That’s OK, in a way. The blog is also a personal history, and stupidity plays a major part in that. In my case, anyway. If this was a company blog? Hmm. Well, maybe I’d make a few edits, especially if the old guy had left.

So the broken links are displayed with the <del> attribute, mostly.

picture credit: zen