Do you raise a child and suddenly, at the age of 3 or 7 or 12, decide to abandon it? Maybe my question is unfair as CNN reported today about a Nebraska safe haven law allowing parents to abandon teens. But generally speaking, do you support child abandonment?
Should a blog be any different?
How many times have you searched for a keyword or a product, reached a blog that provided advice on it, and scrolled to the home page only to realize the most recent post was months or years ago?
If you’re like me, you notice the URL or the blog name and think to yourself, Now, that’s a clever URL or name. I wonder if the owner would be willing to sell it, nay, hand it over to me?
Unfortunately, if the blog hasn’t been updated in x amount of time, chances are the owner abandoned it and left no means of contact. In some cases, his or her name may have been erased too. Maybe the owner started a new job and didn’t want to be associated with the blog, or maybe the blog was a temporary school project and once graduation occurred, the blog died. Who knows the reason.
But blogs do not die. Blogs remain indexed in the blogosphere.
The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission removes abandoned and derelict vessels, the British town of Ealing removes abandoned vehicles, and Texas A&M University removes abandoned bicycles, so shouldn’t someone remove abandoned blogs?
The only question is who should police and remove derelict blogs. Google, owner of the Blogger hosting platform, admits they won’t remove expired blogs.
My initial suggestion was to run a grassroots campaign and ask the world’s search engine companies that control robots and autonomous spiders to remove abandoned blogs from the index based on some criteria that if content hasn’t been updated in so many years. But when squatters are taking over abandoned blogs or hacking them to make $500 a month, my suggestion is now shot.
If you treat your blog as your child, hopefully you won’t abandon it. If you recognize up front that you’d need to care and provide for it over the long-term, you’d do that, right? Else, you shouldn’t conceive the blog’s creation.
Is there any way to remove abandoned blogs, like society removes bicycles, vehicles, and vessels? Or, do you think blogs should remain the way they are?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I agree with you Ari. I don’t know why the domains don’t become available sooner. It seems that the owner paid for a few years at once thinking that his venture would be successful. My wife and I run over 20 blogs, some of them being sniper sites. We don’t have to update them on a daily basis, but we do maintain each and everyone. As a matter of fact, there are a few sites that I’ve tried to get from the owner because of the URL/keyword moneymaking potential. Unfortunately, out of the people that I reached out to, only one replied saying that he wanted $2000 for the domain. The weird thing is that according to GoDaddy.com, it’s not a premium url and should only cost $9.95.
Thanks for the post. I enjoy reading your blog.
I’m new to blogging. But I’m amazed that the connection was made between child abandonment and eternally useless information
Not all seemingly abandoned blogs are “cobwebs”. Moreover, there can be some very useful timeless information locked away in that apparently stagnant pool. We certainly don’t want any kind of Google robocop blasting its way through the blogosphere…what if your child was not abandoned but simply on a gap year?
I’d be mightily pissed off to discover someone had culled my child just because I’d lost touch…
I would love it if they found a way to sweep away the old blogs. When I was searching for a domain name, I came across so many abandoned blogs. It worked out well, but seriously, if you haven’t updated in two years, let someone else have it.
Brush your teeth and go to bed!
I agree with David Bradley. I know of some blogs that are somewhat story like. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. Blogging the first year of your child’s life, a trip, an illness … these are examples just off the top of my head. Some blogs are books and not serials/magazines.
Not nearly as irritating as searching for an event and finding links to years gone by. Searching for festivals in the Dallas area showed links to sites that describes the 2004 event as if it were scheduled for next weekend.
And yet it is equally frustrating to click a link in someone’s blog to get the details of a news story only to find the article no longer there.
I don’t like the idea of an internet police, but it would be great if there were standards for archiving and maintaining websites and even greater if people would be willing to actually follow them.
Billy: Thanks for responding. I clicked the link on your name; is it fair to presume your “blogroll” of finance-relates sites are the others you and your wife manage?
c: For someone new to blogging, I take it you have a blog. I wonder why you don’t link your name to it. Next time, when you are asked to choose an identity, you have the option to type in your URL. Wouldn’t you want other people to visit your blog?
David: I agree there is useful information in a lot of blogs. But there is a lot of useless information in a lot of blogs, too. I don’t know how to remove one set but keeping the other set. Maybe a rating system?
Writer Dad: The problem, in many cases, is the original blog owner doesn’t leave contact information. If it’s a domain, that’s one thing for the information is usually stored in the registrar’s database, but I refer to blogs in the form of x.blogspot.com or x.wordpress.com, etc.
Stetoscope: Umm, ok?
Seren: I’m afraid it’s impossible to have an internet police in the traditional sense of the word. But going to back to what I asked in my response to David, how about some sort of rating system? I have some ideas, which I’ll make the subject of an upcoming post.
Hi Ari – abandoned blogs and old posts really bug me. When I’m Googling something, I would like to see the most up to date info first. But more often than not, what I find are abandoned blogs or articles that are at least three years old.
This is a huge fault with Google. They rank websites according to age but they don’t seem to consider the fact that people want up to date info.
I would really love to know how many abandoned blogs there are on the Internet – I bet it’s a lot.
Cath Lawson´s last blog post..Be A Business Success Story, No Matter What Your Age
Ari, hats off for making that connection!
I don’t necessarily think we need any body to clear up old blogs. There’s still plenty of useful information in some of them. Rather, we just need to accept that the search engines are still learning and it will be a while before they accurately take timing into account.
I can very much identify with the thoughts of Seren Dippity, but sometimes I might not be concerned about age and so de-valuing older sites would not be a good thing.
Basically, the ‘net is still evolving and it will sort itself out. It just takes time.
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