Why have I retired some pages on the canals.com website?
Basically, it’s a question of keeping all the links up to date.
Before retiring any pages, I had about 2500 links on this site. If
I wanted to check them on a monthly cycle, that means I’d need to
check more than 80 links every day to cover all of them in a month.
And some of these will need fixing.
This is a bit too much of a burden, since this site is not a business
but just something I’ve been doing in the hope of being helpful.
Also, the website also does not get a lot of hits. There are several reasons
for this:
most people use searches instead of going to web-directories like
canals.com
when a search does give a hit on my site, it is usually low
down in the hit list, and often not even on the first page
this happens because search engines rank a hit based on how
many other websites link to it AND the ranking of THOSE sites
web-directories like canals.com are linked to from few
business sites, because they are motivated NOT to link.
Why? Here’s an example: I link to a hire firm. Why
would that firm link back to me? All their customers
would see would be a list of the hire firm's competitors!
So I have kept some of the more popular pages and retired the others.
What to do if something on a retired page is still useful
to you