Something happened today that highlights how close to the surface every page on your site is, even if you’ve buried it in your navigation. Someone was doing a photo search on H. Claude Hudson, the first African-American graduate of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. They came upon the August 2001 issue of our campus e-newsletter, which included an article that profiled him. (Despite being an internally focused publication, the e-newsletter and all archives are publicly available online and searchable by our search engine and others, such as Google.)
I’m not sure we even remembered that we’d done an article on him — but when the person contacted our PR people to get a photograph, they were excited to be involved in the creation of the story, rather than finding out about it after it was completed.
Our various Web sites contain different types of information: some is static, in that it remains current and relevant over time; some is temporal, in that it relates to particular events and loses value after those events pass. Our newsletter is temporal in that way: within a few weeks, there’s not much to gain from reading old issues. One might be tempted to remove the old issues, since they have no value, right?
But since search engines change the structure of your navigation — in effect making every page on your site an entry page — unexpected and sometimes fortuitous discoveries occur. It’s best to plan for it.
