April 2007

Pruning Your Online Garden

Your website requires maintenance like anything else, but finding the right balance can be tricky.

By Ian Miller

Spring is the perfect time to prune many plants. Removing extraneous matter allows your plants to devote all their energy to creating new growth. Your website needs the same sort of maintenance.

Keeping your content fresh, accurate, and relevant tells users—and search engines—that your site is alive and well. But just like in your garden, there's a danger of pruning too aggressively. Removing too much content will upset users and search engines alike, and may ultimately kill your traffic. So how do you find the balance? Read on.

Weeding out inaccuracy

The dynamic nature of the Web has conditioned us all to expect instant access to information. As soon as we get wind of the latest celeb scandal or hilarious comedy skit, we immediately head to YouTube—and are incredulous if the video isn't available yet.

This is the environment in which we're all operating: Users require timely and accurate information as a baseline. One bad interaction—an outdated stat, an incorrect stock status message, or a 404 error—is all it can take to lose a user forever.

Unlike print, the Web is dynamic; your content is never "finished." Evergreen content, especially, needs to be monitored regularly to ensure that it's accurate and not misleading.

Delete at your own peril

One thing you don't want to do is start removing pages pell-mell or changing URLs. Doing so could wreak havoc both on your human users and search engine spiders. People may have bookmarked your pages, so deleting a page or changing a URL even slightly will mean their bookmarks will no longer work, and they may give up trying to access your site right then and there.

Deleting pages and changing links may also undermine your search engine ranking. Most search engines institute a "sandbox" in which new sites, links, and pages are placed for a period of time (usually between two and six months). After that time, the pages in question are released from the sandbox and can compete against the rest of the World Wide Web for search engine ranking. If you change the URL of a six-month-old page, you risk the revised page being placed in the sandbox. If you delete the page and replace it, you're in the sandbox. If you don't replace it at all, any search-engine equity you have built up is lost forever. So, whenever possible, keep your existing pages and their URLs, but keep the content within fresh.

Maintenance is ongoing

Unfortunately there's no WWW equivalent of the Sunset Garden Book to tell you when to feed and care for your website. Basically, the nature of your site will determine how often it needs pruning and maintenance.

If you run an e-commerce site, your website's front end better be tied to a back-end database that keeps a real-time tally of your inventory. On the other hand, if you run a mostly static content site, the question is tougher to answer.

Depending on the nature of your site, you need to comb it at least once a year at a bare minimum. If your site purports to offer the latest and greatest info, though, you should be constantly auditing your content. Make sure all your facts, figures, and other information are up-to-date. You should also be thinking about a site redesign about once a year, so it's conceivable that you could undertake the content refresh and redesign at the same time. It's a lot to tackle at once, but both things need to take place regularly.

Tread lightly

But where does simple revision cross the line into revisionist history?

I'd never advocate going back and changing facts and figures in a news story or even a press release. Readers understand that these communications are, by nature, timely, and editing them after they're published is unethical. But if your content is meant to be evergreen—think major content or advice sites like About.com or CNET—it's essential that information is current and reliable.

About the author:

Managing Editor Ian Miller loves content gardening. The real thing, with the plants and the dirt, though? Not so much. It's right up there with folding laundry as far as he's concerned. Email Ian.