Botched a blog rollout last month because I skipped the audit step

I was sitting at my desk in Austin on a Tuesday morning ready to push 12 new blog posts live. Hit publish and realized none of the internal links pointed to the right pillar pages. Had to unpublish everything and spend 4 hours fixing broken paths. The worst part was that three of the posts had already been picked up by a news aggregator with dead links. Now I run a full link audit before I even think about hitting publish. Anyone else skip a step and regret it immediately?

3 comments

3 Comments

anthonymurray16d agoTop Commenter

Tbh I once skipped the alt text review on a batch of images and spent the next three days explaining to my boss why Google was showing our site as "image alt attribute not found" in the search console. It's like the universe punishes you immediately for cutting corners. My coworker still brings it up every time we discuss QA checks.

tyler616d ago

Man, you just reminded me of the time I forgot to add the "nofollow" tag to a bunch of affiliate links on a client's site. Had a full-blown panic when I saw Google crawling all of them like they were gold. Took me half a Saturday to clean it up, and the client still sends me screenshots of their analytics whenever we talk about site updates. It's funny how one little checkbox can haunt you for years.

lopez.karen16d ago

Now I run a broken link checker before publish and keep a spreadsheet of every pillar URL. Saves me from that stomach drop feeling.