Check Your Top Traffic Pages For Out Of Date Links!

by on May 17, 2011

Every once in a while I’ll pick a night and rather than creating new content on an existing site or creating a new affiliate site, I’ll go back through my existing sites and check for out of date affiliate offers or links.

Checking every single page is hard considering I have more than 600 pages of hand written content at this point across all my sites, but WordPress provides some simple stats tools that make it easy to see which are the most trafficed pages on each site over a given time period.

Typically I’ll take my 10-20 traffic articles and/or outbound links and check that they are still valid.  I did a quick sweep and cleaned up:

  1. The article on this site about free one use credit card numbers was out of date since Paypal discontinued their one time use card program.  I updated it to include another free card that let you generate single use secure card numbers.
  2. An Amazon affiliate link on another site that was getting 6-7 hits a day was getting a 404 error from Amazon since they moved the product for some reason.
  3. Another article that gets 50-100 views a day on the summer was pointing to a product on a site that had no affiliate program.  Amazon started carrying that product, so I updated it and added some affiliate links.
  4. Found another article that gets 20-30 views a day and 2-3 clicks to Amazon a day.  My wife had written it last year and it was missing our affiliate tags.

Honestly, for one hour of work those small tweaks will earn more money than if I had spent 10 hours writing 2-3 good articles.

Always take a quick look back at your old content and make sure it’s still working for you!

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Wendell (aka Rocking Chair Wisdom) May 23, 2011 at 1:29 am

The Broken Link Checker WP Plugin will identify broken links and depending upon how you set the parameters will take action on them. Also, you can have BLC email you whenever it finds a broken link.

Just beginning to follow your blog and am enjoying your writing.

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