When it comes to building a website, one of the biggest mistakes is tearing everything down and rebuilding from scratch over and over. That usually means repeated shutdowns and relaunches, deleting all existing content, and leaving behind a pile of dead links.
I was reminded of this because a friend of mine does exactly that. Just a couple of days ago, he told me his blog needed to be “reorganized.” The moment I heard that, my first thought was: here we go again, he’s probably about to wipe it all and restart.
As far as I can remember, this friend has rebuilt several of his sites countless times. Every time a site goes live and runs for a while, he comes up with a new idea. Then the site gets taken offline, or he stops updating it. Some time later, it suddenly comes back online, he publishes a few posts, then loses momentum again. The cycle just keeps repeating.
We’ve known each other since college, and up to now, his blog has only managed to stay online steadily for close to four months. Even calling that four months of real operation would be generous, since he has published fewer than ten articles in that time. And yet, he already seems to have some new plan in mind.
I’m joking a little at his expense, but the problem is real: he simply has too many ideas and too little patience. If someone is always restless and cannot settle down to do one thing properly, it becomes very hard to achieve anything solid.
That brings me back to the actual point.
Search engines usually put new websites through a kind of evaluation period. In other words, when a new site goes live, it is not necessarily going to be fully shown right away. If it does not pass that initial assessment smoothly, it may fall into a long sandbox period. Only after the site gradually gains more complete and richer content will indexing and rankings begin to appear.
That is why many SEO practitioners suggest filling a new site with at least some content before launch. A website should not go online as nothing more than an empty shell or bare framework. Otherwise, the first impression you give a search engine is that the site is still unfinished.
Now imagine what happens if a site has not yet passed that early evaluation stage—or has already entered the sandbox—and then it gets shut down or abandoned. The search engine can only clear out the data it previously crawled. If this keeps happening again and again, the site under that domain will begin to accumulate dead links.
The reason is simple: when the site goes live again, search engines may return to crawl URLs that were indexed before. But if those old pages no longer exist, the crawler hits 404 pages instead. That is also why some site owners are puzzled when they see search engines reporting dead links on what they think is a “new” website. In reality, those links may be leftovers from earlier versions that were repeatedly removed.
To be honest, what I most want to say is not only about building websites.
It is really about a person’s attitude toward doing things. That’s the core of it.