If you’ve been on the internet for any period of time, you begin to realize that a lot of data can accumulate on your website, and much of it can go out of date. As a matter of fact, keeping your website lean and clean ends up becoming a major priority.

Who likes outdate info? Nobody. Why would I spend time reading about Apache 1.3.4 when there are much newer versions online? I wouldn’t , and neither would you. People want information that is accurate and up to date. This is true of every website you run, but in particular it’s important if you run a website that allows user entered input. The chance is great that you’ll have a high percentage of inaccurate information on the website and it hurts you in a number of ways:

• You look clueless when you link to dead sites. The bots follow a ton of dead links, and don’t find usefull website. In fact, you point them to sites that don’t even exist. Some resource you turned out to be.
• People, also, can tell how moribund your site has become. Visitors can see no one has updated in a while. If they have larceny in their hearts, they’ll attempt to make the problem even worse.

Activity is a great thing for your website, but sloppy and uneven growth won’t help. For this reason, you should also take an honest look at sections of your website and consider if they can really benefit the internet is large. If they cannot, in your opinion, then remove them or exclude them from crawling. This makes sense because you devote less of your precious resources to a section that just won’t help you that much.

Still not convinced? What if I told you that cleaning up your website can also give you a boost in the rankings, especially if you’ve been struggling lately. I know I rehabilitate a forgotten website and it came back from death’s door.

A cleanup is especially important if you have a blog or forum that has been compromised by spammers.  Clean up the spam, limit spiders to the important sections, and you might be surprised how quickly you rise again.  Hey, It’s Spring.  Now is the time to clean up and bounce back.