The Deets

What did you really expect from a site called Daily Misleader?

I know most of our wcco.com links stay up forever… but we did change our CMS which broke all of my blog links. Much to my excitement.

I’m not sure if our redesign broke all our old links too.

Gabe, I thought they were straight shooters, but not I feel mislead.

Jason, it would be nice if webmasters would set up redirects to the new locations of content after doing CMS changes. However, it’s often overlooked.

So, let me ask for online-savvy opinions–
1) since you can virtually guarantee these 10 sites will break links in the near future; and
2) you could cut n’ paste (whole or substantive portions of) the article below the fold after you op-ed and give the newsource link.

-Since you cite the origin, it would not violate copyright, right?

I understand it is extra work structuring the blog posting, but so is cleaning up broken links and so is hunting for secondary story coverage that you hope will not also break.
–And, since sites of origin like Startrib disappear, you would soon be the final online source for these pageviews and thus ad clicks, eh?

This could be blogger win for you, the Startrib et al does the heavy lifting of writing the story and leaves you all the ad rev after a mere 30 days, no?

I definitely receive traffic from people searching for stories I’ve written about that are no longer available from sources like the ones listed above. However, wholesale copy/pasting the articles - even with citation - wouldn’t fly. That’s not to say that a zillion spam blogs don’t automatically scrape and republish content as an advertising play, but that doesn’t make it right or legal.

Ah, the old black hat seo trick, I forgot about the content scrapers. See, I’m so innocent, I forget about people who do these things for evil, I just think about the good of preserving valued content from being lost in untimely data purges by large companies who don’t bother to determine the value of their own work.

So, we all lose.

Jason, it looks like it was blog posts and Reality Check episodes that broke on wcco.com

We spent a lot of money to make sure all our links were forwarded when we changed cms. Got any specifics on what link broke?

p.s. if it was a restaurant page link, I take it all back. We still haven’t figured out why those forwards didn’t work.

Tom, on closer inspection, it looks like that was money well spent. I tested the links and found that the plugin wasn’t picking up on 301 redirects. After that, I’m down to one link from The Rake on this page.

It doesn’t 404, but it no longer goes to what I reference.

Nice job on the move. Very well done.

Yup, that one expired because the promotion ended. Thanks.

Seems a little harsh to include MinnPost in the Top Ten considering our deadlinks are “pre-launch” press releases. Hard to dispute the assessment that it was dumb, but any chance we can get a do-over using the “post-launch” site?

Hi Karl, good call on doing another round of this. At this point, I imagine MinnPost would fare well in this test.

However, I read very little of the site’s content (and thus get around to linking to it) because the feeds are truncated. As of this morning, I’m subscribed to 381 feeds in my Google Reader. Subscribing to feeds that force me to click out just to read the content doesn’t seem rational to me based on how I consume the news when I’ve been able to find so many great news sources that don’t require me to do so.

Thanks for the do-over. And looks like there will be a “Top-10 Least RSS-Friendly Sites I Have in my Google Reader” post coming in the near future?

Actually, I’ve written the RSS post before over here. Very few truncated RSS feeds make it into my reader (7 out of 381 feeds I subscribe to are truncated and that includes MinnPost feeds I subscribe to).

But that’s not a top-10 list… I was attempting humor right there. Anyway, thanks for your ongoing commentary. We all do appreciate it!