A Spammer Helped Me Fix my Website
It is exceedingly rare for me to say that a spammer has been helpful.
They have helped me garner some points, plus share some sarcasm, on ActiveRain (The Advantages of Spam on ActiveRain) and I was able to refresh my college French due to a spammer (Oui Oui Spam en Français). Beyond that I find spam abhorrent.
But I owe a big THANK YOU to a spammer yesterday who helped me fix my website.
I got an email, clearly spam, letting me know there were 3 broken links on my www.AtHomeInCarlsbad.com website relating to Carlsbad Schools, and that if I wanted there was a great link that could be substituted that would help readers learn more about public schools. I didn’t check the link, for obvious reasons.
But it made me wonder.
So I went back and checked the links and sure enough they were, in fact, broken.
In a panic, I ran a broken link check on my site, viewing about 370 web pages, finding 28 broken links. It took about 90 minutes to make all the corrections and update my Wordpress site late last night.
In looking at the links on the backend of my site it’s clear part of the problem was the link simply wasn’t there (either the html somehow disappeared or I thought I had saved it and had not).
The bigger issue is that some of the links, particularly to the school websites, among a few others, had actually changed and were not redirected. How does one find THAT out?!
And admittedly there were a couple of minor typos (e.g., a comma instead of a period.) that caused the problem.
I have to thank this spammer for the assistance in making these corrections. And I learned a good lesson.
I will now pay much closer attention to my linking, and go in and double check them, plus run a broken link check regularly.
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