By Peter K. Lam
Yahoo! 404 error
I get almost all of my news thru RSS feeds. I find it to be a lot easier to just subscribe to feeds and read the news briefs all in one place then click to read more on the stuff I really care about. I often save clippings of my favorite stories because I would either write a new blog on it or maybe use an article as source material for a new story. Yesterday I was looking through my RSS aggregator, Newsgator, and started clicking on some clippings I saved only to find that the articles have “expired.” The good stuff I saved was from Yahoo! and the all have since been removed. So I wonder, why in the world would they “expire” their online content?
First of all, one of the main principles of internet marketing is that you never, EVER, delete, remove or expire your website content unless you absolutely need to. Website credibility is built upon how long a website has been up in addition to other factors like how many pages of creditable information is online. Following this model, nobody should be taking pages off the internet unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so. One instance that may warrant page deletion would be the presentation of inaccurate information or something to that extent. Personally I still wouldn’t remove the page in that instance. I would simply post an update to that page notifying readers that the information is outdated and that they are reading an old article or old news.
Social bookmarking and sharing of articles on the web continues to grow more and more popular everyday. People who find a story interesting or valuable will bookmark a page using a site, like Delicious which happens to be owned by Yahoo! no less, or on their RSS aggregator like I did. Using sites like Digg or Buzz Up! as a means to increase exposure of articles is also growing very popular but if pages people are saving with these new methods get removed, what is the point of saving them? People save the pages expecting that they would remain online till the end of time. Nobody expects to see an article removed. It really just doesn’t make much logical sense.
The story clipping I saved from Yahoo! was a simple story about a man who found a hidden room that was completely sealed off while he renovated his newly purchased home. I really like the article and thought it had great story potential. The article was in no way shape or form time sensitive nor did it have any information in it that may prove problematic if left online. It was just an interesting story so I’m really just confused as to why such a story would be removed.
I’m not sure if Yahoo! have recently picked up this practice but every clipping that I save from them, dating as far back as seven months, have all been removed from their site. All those articles came up as 404 errors. If they kept these pages, and all the other pages they may have deleted, they would have so many more pages online. Yahoo! has been around since the dawn of the internet. I expected that they would be one of the companies out there that are fully aware of the common good practices of maintaining data on the web. I guess I was mistaken. So from now on I may just need to print out the articles I really like and save them the old fashioned way or in a few months the story will just miraculously disappear from the internet.
