Out‑of‑date Response Pages

A key component of trust is keeping your site up to date – changing the copyright, pulling down content that is clearly dated or event-specific. It’s not that hard to keep the main pages of your site up to date — you probably look at them all the time. It is hard to remember to update less traveled pages, especially when they are response pages that you rarely look at.

Since Future Now is exemplary in every other way (and would surely agree as to the importance of keeping one’s site up to date), I thought I’d start with them as an example. I send customers to their WeWe Calculator all the time, and I even reference it in my What is Link Bait? article. But if you use their calculator and hit the enter button, you get a page like this:

Notice that the lower right corner, that I highlighted in yellow, has dates from 2004.

You know what they say about glass houses and stones, right? You shouldn’t think that I am throwing anything here, because I found these results when I used the (not terribly great) on-site search on the LunaMetrics site:

See the out-of-date copyright? Despite the fact that LunaMetrics has an .asp site (so we have lots of elements that we can change once and they get changed everywhere), our copyright is not included in those “includes”. It needs to be changed on every page by hand – and it wasn’t changed on the response page to the on-site search.

I fixed it before I sent out this post, but it makes one wonder about all the other “hidden” pages. Responses to email sign-ups. Responses to “Contact my Company.” Email responses that are sent out when a customer requests a white paper — maybe the page is up to date but the white paper is not.