How to survive a writing website closure: Beat the cache flow problem

Web writers aiming to republish their own work after it’s appeared on now defunct websites need to beware of this search engine peril.

Don’t get caught in the cache!

What does that even mean?

The major internet search engines (such as Google) create caches of web pages, which can linger in cyberspace long after those pages have been removed.

That means potential readers who search on any topic are likely to find cached pages in their listed results. What’s more, if those now-vanished pages were highly ranked by those internet search engines, they will hog the top positions in the search results.

Readers may click those top links, only to find the pages missing. Worse yet, their link clicks may be re-routed.

Either way, writers who have moved their previously published work to their own blogs or still thriving sites may lose those potential readers, along with their lovely page views.

That’s the first problem. The next one may be even more perilous for those who publish online.

Search engines hate duplicate content.

If cached items still appear, writers’ republished items are likely to be tagged as exactly that.

To prevent this problem, it’s important to report cached links when they appear. Here’s how to do report dead links to Bing, to Google or to Yahoo.

Once that’s done, the material now published in new places should be recognized as new and unique (unless it also appears on other sites).

Eventually, caches are updated, eliminating the problem. But, in the meantime, those early potential content readers may have moved along.

Beat the cache flow problem, and keep those readers coming your way!

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