Broken Links and Aligning My Site for a More Intimate Browsing Experience

When it comes to maintaining websites, there’s a layer of dirty, yet important work that never makes it into the spotlight.

You won’t see it in a headline. It doesn’t sit inside any of the stories here. It doesn’t seduce you into clicking. But it’s there—under the surface—quietly deciding whether anything I write ever finds you in the first place.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working behind the scenes on this site. Not writing. Not publishing. Not promoting. Just… cleaning.

After crossing the thousand-post mark, I hit a point where the site stopped feeling like a curated body of work and started feeling like a room that had slowly filled with furniture no one remembered buying. Everything still worked. Nothing was technically broken. But the flow—the logic—the connection between things—was off.

So I started pulling it apart (so I could put it back together).

The First Shift: Linking What Was Always Meant to Be Connected

A blog with a thousand posts isn’t a collection. It’s a system.

Or at least, it should be.

For a long time, my posts existed like isolated thoughts. Each one stood on its own. You could read one, leave, and never know there were hundreds more sitting behind it—related, connected, sometimes even directly feeding into the same idea.

That’s a missed opportunity.

So I started linking them.

Not randomly. Not aggressively. But deliberately.

A post about a loss of intimacy now leads you to another that explores betrayal. A piece on photography threads into something darker—control, perception, voyeurism. A discussion about relationships doesn’t end when the page does. It branches.

This is what a site is meant to feel like: not a wall of disconnected articles, but a network. A system where one idea leans into the next.

Search engines understand this kind of structure. They look for it. They reward it. But more importantly, readers feel it.

You don’t need to know it’s happening. You just need to notice that you stayed longer than you planned to.

That’s the point.

It’s slow work. Aligning a thousand posts isn’t something you do in a weekend. I’ve started with the most recent content—the last couple of months—and brought some order to it. The rest will follow, piece by piece, over time.

From the outside, nothing looks different.

But under the surface, everything is beginning to connect.

The Second Shift: Cutting Down the Noise

Let’s talk about tags for a moment.

At one point, I had over a thousand of them. I applied them liberally to each post I wrote.

That sounds productive. It also sounds thorough. It sounds like I was covering my content at every possible angle.

I wasn’t.

I was diluting everything.

Every time I published a post, I’d attach a handful of tags—some used once, some twice, some never again. Over time, the tag system became less of a guide and more of a graveyard of half-formed ideas.

Search engines don’t like half-formed anything.

They don’t see depth. They see inconsistency.

So I stripped it back.

Hard.

Now there are 65 tags. Each one deliberate. Each one is tied directly to the core of what this site is about—writing, psychology, relationships, photography, dark fiction. No filler. No speculation. No, “this might be relevant.”

If it doesn’t belong, it doesn’t stay.

What that does—quietly—is sharpen the identity of the site. It tells search engines what this place is about, without hesitation or contradiction.

And for readers? It means when you follow a tag, you’re not led into a dead end or a scattered list of unrelated posts. You’re stepping into a focused stream of content that knows exactly what it’s doing.

That’s the difference between noise and intent.

The Third Shift: The Problem You Didn’t See

Broken links.

There were over 150 of them.

That’s 150 moments where a reader clicks—and nothing happens. Or worse, they land somewhere that no longer exists.

That’s friction. And friction kills trust.

Some of these came from the site’s move. When I exported content from one place and imported it into the other, the links came with it—intact and functional… until the original source disappeared.

Which it did.

At the time, everything worked. The old site was still live. The links pointed exactly where they were supposed to. Then one day, the lights went out—and those connections quietly broke.

I didn’t notice straight away. You rarely do.

It took a link scan to expose it.

The rest came from external links—sites I referenced years ago that no longer exist. That’s not unusual. The internet is transient. Sites appear, grow, fade, and vanish.

Most don’t last.

Some estimates suggest a large percentage of websites disappear within five years. Even established platforms change—pages get deleted, URLs get rewritten, content gets reshaped. When that happens, any link pointing to the old version becomes useless.

And useless links don’t just frustrate readers.

They weaken the site.

Search engines see them as neglect. As decay. As a signal that the structure isn’t being maintained.

So I removed them. What wasn’t maintained became maintained.

That was the only part of this entire process that could be done quickly. One sweep. One clean. One day of work.

Everything else—the alignment, the structure, the refinement—that takes time.

So What’s the Goal?

This is where it gets interesting.

Because “more traffic” isn’t the real answer.

It’s the easy answer. The obvious one. The one everyone reaches for first.

But it’s shallow.

Traffic is a byproduct of the work spoken of above.

The real goal is alignment.

A site needs to know what it is. Not to its author. To its audience.

Not vaguely. Not loosely. Not “I write about a bit of everything, so come find me.” That doesn’t work anymore.

From a search engine’s perspective, structure matters more than volume. It looks at how your posts connect, how your tags reinforce your themes, and how your internal links build pathways between ideas.

It’s not just indexing content.

It’s reading intent.

If the structure is weak—if posts float without connection, if tags scatter in all directions, if links lead nowhere—then the site becomes background noise. It gets indexed, sure. But it’s not prioritised.

It doesn’t stand out. It doesn’t get chosen.

But when everything aligns—when posts support each other, when tags reinforce meaning, when links create a clear path through the content—the site becomes something else entirely.

It becomes coherent.

And coherence is what search engines reward.

The Quiet Truth About SEO

Most people think SEO is about visibility.

It’s not.

It’s about matchmaking.

Search engines don’t exist to promote [unpaid] content. They exist to connect people with what they’re already looking for.

Think of it less like a billboard and more like a dating app.

Someone searches for something specific—an idea, a feeling, a question they can’t quite articulate. The search engine scans what’s available and introduces them to a piece of content that might be relevant to them.

That’s the moment that matters.

Not the click.

The connection.

Whether they stay. Whether they read on. Whether something in the text holds them there just a little longer than expected, search engines don’t do follow-ups.

They don’t care if it turns into something meaningful and romantic. Their job ends at the introduction.

Happy ever after is someone else’s responsibility.

Where This Leaves the Site

From the outside, nothing has changed.

You’ll still see the same posts. The same images. The same tone. The same undercurrent that runs through everything I write.

But underneath, the structure is tightening. The connections are becoming clearer. The noise is being stripped away.

And slowly, the site is shifting from a collection of thoughts into something more deliberate—something that knows exactly what it is and where it’s going.

It’s not finished.

It won’t be for a while.

But that’s the nature of this kind of work. It’s iterative. Quiet. Ongoing.

You don’t notice it happening.

You just notice that something feels… easier.

More connected.

More intentional.

And maybe—without quite knowing why—you stay a little longer.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)