I was sitting here, drinking an iced coffee and enjoying my day. Writing a little Blog post, answering a few emails – catching up on things and BAM out of nowhere, an old site from my past caught up with me.
Suddenly there it was on my screen, 2, shall we say less than friendly tweets, about an old site I had with obviously old information. They took pleasure in lambasting me for having old content out there. They were kind enough to remind me that it was the year 2011 (Phew, can cross looking up what year it is off my To Do list for the day!! Excellent!) and my content was dated.
Now, I hadn’t touched the site in at least 6 years and even then my web guy just updated the copyright, it’s been about 9 – 10 years since I really updated the site. But there it sits, out there for the world to see, with my name on it. Shame on me!
So forget the tweets, they aren’t important – that they chose to insult instead of trying to help a fellow colleague says more about them than me. But what was important was they were right – I had an old site sitting out there for the world to see.
It bears repeating: shame on me!
In today’s internet with the ability to find anything and everything, you need to be careful what you have out there. People will find it. And even if I am not publishing that as new content today, I still put it out there and left it out there, so I am responsible for it.
<For those who are wondering, the offending piece of content was that I mentioned Alta Vista in a list of engines and I didn’t have Bing listed.>
There are 2 problems with having that content out there:
- For those that are “in the know” it hurts my credibility to see that I still have old content published. They don’t know that it isn’t a site I use (aside from the dated content, the order links on the page didn’t even work anymore!)
- For those that aren’t “in the know” they would never know that the content was old and irrelevant and would just believe it because they read it, so there is an issue with the quality of information that is out there when it gets out of date.
The misinformation spreading mentioned in point 2 concerns me more. There are enough SEO myths out there floating around without adding old content that is seen as current into the mix to further confuse people.
So what to do?
Keep an “asset” list. What Blogs, sites, autoresponder messages etc do you have out there that are currently serving up any information at all?
List when they were last updated and a few times a year (or once a year at a bare minimum) check it out and make sure you keep all the information current. It’s pretty easy to do and it’ll keep you from misleading people and looking less than credible.
You see, I just stopped using that site; I used it for years and then decided to change my focus. I meant to go back and clean it up but I got busy and I forgot.
We all get busy and we have so many things to manage now – sites, Blogs, social media accounts, articles, autoresponder messages etc. But it’s important that we all do our part to keep our information current and to put our best foot (and content) forward.
Not a long post this time and not a super in-depth analysis of a topic but an important reminder for all of us who manage many “assets” online.
So get checking and clean up what you have out there, or one day half way through your own iced coffee, it’ll pop up and bite you in the butt too.
So I learned a little lesson and have some work to do now to do my own clean up. While I work on that, I will remain grateful for one thing…. while hunting through old content, at least they didn’t dig up any old photos of me from back in the day. Bad 80s hair, nice blue eye shadow… now that would have been really embarrassing!
