Low End Mac has been online since April 1997 and is composed of thousands upon thousands of pages. Everything from 2013 and beyond is in WordPress. Our most popular content from before 2013 is also in WordPress. But thousands upon thousands of articles are still in HTML files.

There are two issues dragging down lowendmac.com in search engine ranking. The first is that our most popular content prior to 2013 is all at a new URL, so all those years of building traffic to the old URLs now works against us. Fortunately WordPress has a Redirection module to send traffic looking for the old link to the new URL. Unfortunately search engines don’t think that’s good enough. But it’s what we can do.

The second issue is a much bigger one. We have thousands upon thousands of bad links in those old pages. Over the past two weeks, we’ve found and fixed over 600 bad links in our WordPress content, thanks to a WordPress link checking module, and have less than three dozen at the moment. It’s tedious, but bad links in a page lower search engine rank, so we need to get those fixed.

While we’re at that, we may as well take the extra step of migrating those old articles to WordPress so the link checker can keep an eye on them. And while we’re migrating article to WordPress, we’re adding links to more recent content, to Wikipedia, and to other sources. We’re adding keywords for searching. We’re often adding images or converting old GIF images to the more compact PNG format.

We are absolutely indebted to the Internet Archive for giving us the ability in many cases to link to old versions of pages that are no longer on the interwebs, which is one of the biggest bad link issues. Another one, which we haven’t solved yet, is thanks to Apple killing of the iTools/.Mac homepages that we often linked to – and which are not archived by the Internet Archive nor redirected to a new URL by Apple. They are just dead, although I have managed to find where a few have gone.

We are also making sure that you recognize old content. Unless the title makes reference to a year or its obviously a historical piece that is essentially timeless, we begin the first paragraph by noting the original year of publication – and these articles also have date stamps the correspond to their first publication dates.

That’s why you might find a group of ‘Book Review columns from 2002 or articles on DRM or Rumor Mill columns showing up in batches. Day by day I try to migrate a bit more from the past into the present, give it a quick readthrough, update links, and so forth. In a few years we may finish this project, but I’m having a blast reading content from 1997 and beyond.

Enjoy the history!

Dan Knight, publisher, Low End Mac

If you haven’t seen links to the old content, you’re not following our Facebook page (not our Facebook group, which is a separate thing), Google Plus, or Twitter. Those are the best way to learn right away about new content that doesn’t make it on the home page because of its publication date.

Keywords: #wordpress #badlinks #lowendmac

Short link: http://goo.gl/kPI0Ki

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