Making your site run deep with articles, either by oneself or guest contributors has long been a recommended strategy for keeping your site “sticky,” encouraging return visitors and making spiders and robots happy. But what happens when the content or contact information in these articles becomes outdated?

I recently contacted one of my contributors and let him know that his article (written about 4 years ago) gets a lot of traffic, something I’ve noticed about a lot of the pieces in the archives for the area on my web site known as “On The Mark.” While this made him happy, the writer was also prompted to revisit this piece and took a tour of my site while he was there.

He noticed that his original article contained outdated phone, email and website information and also took a moment to do a few edits on the piece. As a result, his article is now up-to-date and anyone who finds it compelling can get in touch. Better yet, that page has working links reestablished.

The moral of the story: if you do decide to regularly add new content, you’ll need to review it all from time to time. This can be a huge task, one you’ll be tempted to postpone again and again. I learned from this experience that just getting in touch with the author is an effective way to avoid broken links while maintaining your network of contacts. By the way, if you want to read the article I’m talking about by Will Hepburn, go here.