Blog Maintenance: Checked your blogroll lately?

If you're a blogger you've probably got a blogroll. If you've been blogging for a while, chances are your blogroll has gotten pretty lengthy as you've traded links with various bloggers. I've been blogging for over a year and had 31 blogs I was linking to from my blog. It struck me tonight that it's been a while since a viewed a few of them so I decided to start going down the list and here's what I found:

• Dead Blogs - Two of the blogs don't exist anymore. The guys shut them down for various reasons.
• Dying Blogs - One of the blogs hadn't been updated since April. It's on life support at best.
  
• Departed Blogs - One of the blogs had a new address and I was linking to an old blog.

Needless to say it wasn't speaking well for my blog upkeep to be linking to dead, dying, and departed blogs. The dead and dying blogs were removed and the departed blog now links to the appropriate address. A few of the existing blogs are close to hitting a month of zero blog posts so I'll check on them again over the next few weeks. I don't know when I'll officially put them into the "dying" category (and therefore remove them from my blogroll) but if six weeks have passed without a post I think it's fair to say the blog is dying.

So when is the last time you went through your own blogroll? Are you linking to any dead, dying or departed blogs?