Zen and the art of website maintenance

Broken links and how to check for them

This may well be something that as a client you can check and repair yourself. If you have written a blog post for example and included a link to a useful page on another website then this may well function correctly for a long time but due to some external event involving that other website, without realising it your link may get broken. The destination page for your link may get moved to another page or the site may be moved to another domain or taken down altogether.

Having a broken link is a bit of a red flag for your website unfortunately and may spoil your rankings.

There are many free tools you can find online to check your site for broken links and I recommend that you do a check a couple of times a year and fix any links you can or contact your developer for help if you cannot fix or remove the broken link yourself.

Here is my review of some online broken link checkers that I found online: Broken Link Checkers

Software modules that no longer function.

Website software technology is not a static thing. New versions of software are constantly being released to fix a problem or to improve a piece of software and there are many different moving parts involved in website technology.

WordPress users will know all about this as WordPress modules are regularly being updated in order to combat potential hackers. WordPress modules talk to each other so as one module is changed, it may well be that many other WordPress modules need to be updated as well in order to keep ahead of the hackers.

Fortunately in my world of Rapidweaver developers, we don't suffer from the added complexities involved in changing software to combat hackers and instances of hacking are exceedingly rare.

A more common problem, open to any website development platform including Rapidweaver is communication with third-party software. Many pieces of third-party software have what is called an API or an Application Programming Interface. For example, to put a Google map showing your physical location onto a page on your site, you will probably be communicating with Google maps via their Google Maps API. Another example is if you have a feed of Instagram posts on a page then you will be communicating with Instagram through their API. It only needs Google or Meta to change the protocols by which a developer can communicate with them and suddenly all the old sites start to look broken as the maps feed or the Instagram feed no longer works.

There is nothing that a client can do about this except to flag the issue to their developer if they see that something is broken and ask them if they can fix it.

Server changes that may impact your website

Like any other computer, a web server may start to deteriorate over time. Your website hosting company may well decide to update their servers and move all the sites they have across to new servers. In theory, this should be transparent to you and may even help your site by improving the speed at which your site is delivered to your customer's browsers. However, even the best laid plans may not give the results that are expected. Levels of technology may change and it may be necessary for some work to be done on the website by your developer to accommodate this.

One example I have encountered is where a hosting company replaced their servers and sent out an email telling their customers that if they were linking from the domain to the hosting using IP addresses, these addresses would need to be updated with new IP addresses. As a client this is not something that you want to be handling yourself and it is best to refer these sorts of emails to your developer to check whether there is anything that needs to be done.

Google penalties and how to fix them

Assuming that your website is performing well and nothing is broken, the next area to consider is SEO and whether your rankings are doing OK. If you are monitoring your rankings and you suddenly notice a significant drop in rankings you should probably take some action.

The first thing I would do is run my audit tools against the site. This will tell me whether there are any broken links, or whether any huge images have been loaded to the site which would cause the site to 'go slow'.

I would then go to the Google search Console and the Bing Webmaster Tools page to see if there are clues there. One particular item I would be looking for is Google penalties.

The other scenario that may be at play if you see a sudden drop in rankings is if Google have just released an update affecting the way they rank websites in your country so see if you can whether the ranking drop is just affecting you or whether it affects other websites too. Assuming that it is not a Google update that is the culprit and you have no penalties showing then get your site audited (WebSite Auditor is the tool I use) to check for obvious errors.

If a Google update is in play here and you and your developer make some changes to try and fix the situation, be patient. Changes can take many days or weeks to pan out and for your website to recover.

Review your content

One thing that can do no harm is to review your content for spam or duplicate content. With AI-written content now becoming a possibility, Google are rolling out spam detection algorithms to counter this trend. 

Even before AI came along, thin pages of content were usually considered of little relevance so any blog posts with very few words on them are probably being ignored anyway. Check the search console to see if any pages that have a significant amount of text content are not indexed and see if you can request for them to be indexed.

If you have very thin blog post pages of content then consider updating them with more well-written, jargon-free text or getting rid of them altogether.

Unparsable Structured Data

On a couple of occasions I have seen a message from the Google Search Console telling me that I have some 'Unparsable Structured Data'. If you see this message it is worth checking the page mentioned using the Schema Markup Testing Tool which shows in more detail whereabouts on the page the error occurs. I recently found that by removing some centred text at the end of a blog post that was in bold and in single quotes, I was able to get rid of this error message, although don't ask me to explain how the text i removed impacts structured data.

Check for pages not indexed

Also on the Google search console, check for pages not indexed and an explanation why. If they are important pages for your site then you ought to try and get them indexed.

Check for duplicates

Use a duplicate checker such as Siteliner to make sure you don't have duplicate content on your site, or rather that you have low levels of duplication as some duplication is inevitable when we all use the same language and terminology.

Check for thin or spammy content

Check your blog posts for posts that are either very few words or appear to have very little meaningful content. See if you can improve the text/increase the text word count, or you may decide just to delete the blog post. Even if you don't get a penalty notice, thin and spammy content is diluting your page ranking so ideally it should be either removed or improved.

In summary, there are several things both technical and content oriented that could change the way your website performs over time, performance being measured both in terms of the speed of the site as it loads and also the way it gets ranked.

Some of the checks and fixes mentioned are well within the capabilities of site owners whilst others may need input from a developer or SEO specialist. 

I am aware that many of my clients get regular emails from companies touting for work saying that their website, although it is well designed, has a whole list of faults. I know this because I get them too and they often contain a so called 'fault' that it is easy to prove is inaccurate. I can only assume that everyone is getting the same list of faults and that sometimes the person writing these emails strikes lucky. 

So my advice is to be very careful before you go down the road of having your site rebuilt in response to one of these emails. Get a third party opinion on the state of your website and then make a decision on who to trust.

If you would like to know more about the way I go about website designing then please contact me.