Yesterday was a strange day. It all started when I received a text with a simple statement: ‘Sheffield’s flooded’. Not something you want to hear when you’re heading home there in an hour. However, I dismissed it. Surely the ramblings of an over-dramatic girlfriend?

It wasn’t – you may have seen it on the news. Well, I got on my train, sat and waited to be taken under water to the place I call home. Except it didn’t happen, as everyone suddenly remembered trains aren’t supposed to go under water and hence it was cancelled. We were then told that local trains were still running. Marvelling at the sudden transformer-like ability of local trains to turn into boats, I headed over to the platform, where I met an American who was trying to get to Sheffield for some university-related event. We got on the train and headed towards Waterworld, talking about our jobs to pass the time.

It’s amazing what you can pick up simply by talking to someone with a different role in life. The American, a university lecturer, explained to me about some issues they were having with the University website. Apparently they had recently re-launched their business school but, they were having problems with their results in search engines for targeted search terms. The previous incarnation of the business school had closed down in 1999, but the news story reporting the closure appears top of the current search results for their targeted search terms. Therefore, people were searching for the well-publicised school, stumbling upon this news story and ringing up to ask why the school had closed already.

The moral to this story: always keep tabs on your old pages. Some SEO’s prefer to keep old content in the directory – an indexed page with old content that could still lead to a valued visitor is better than a valued visitor lost. However, as demonstrated by my American flood-victim, sometimes old content is more trouble than it’s worth.

We made it to Sheffield and lived to spread this wisdom.

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