(With apologies to Mr. Mister ) Man, when I decided to clean up the mess that is THE Canadian Personal Finance Place, I had no idea how much bloody work this was going to be!

Evidently with the new Google algorithm, lots of broken links are a big No-No, so when I started my clean up I used a Broken Link Plug In and it said I had over 900 broken links (that it could find), so I have spent countless hours remedying that situation, but it now has me thinking:

1. Carnivals are a bitch once the post is over 6 months old (especially the Carnival of Personal Finance which is just too darn big), because inevitably links die off, when folks change their sites! I have spent countless hours cleaning up that mess, but it has me thinking that maybe I don’t want to host any more carnivals. I guess another useful tool might be one that looks at a post and the rank of the sites and posts in the carnival so you can trim out old useless links.
2. My weekly Friday post which includes links to a whole bunch of other sites for the week is yet another headache, because things change, and there are countless stale links in those posts too! Also when I change anything on these posts I fire out hundreds of link messages to these sites, so I must be really popular with those folks too.
3. When Stats Canada moved their site, it screwed up a TON of my posts, and they seem to remove information older than a few months as well

This is making me think that I may need to rethink my whole link-building concept, because part of it needs to be the constant maintenance of these links as well.

The other interesting thing I found out this week, is thanks to being put into Google’s Penalty Box, I got an e-mail asking me to REMOVE COMMENTS from a bunch of my articles, by a fellow blogger. I was not linking to his site(s), he left comments, however, I guess Google’s new algorithm takes into account whether you leave comments on “naughty sites” like mine. I have removed a few of the comments, but that is a bit much to ask (IMHO). Maybe it is time for me to start charging for this service.

This whole thing is quite interesting, but now I am thinking that as part of my duties for running my site I am going to have to add in “site maintenance” every week to keep things, “fit and trim”.