Someone is going to get their ass kicked. Just saying.

Last night, I discovered links on my clients site were broken or being redirected. Links that originally pointed to reference pages of one of the USA’s military branches.

That branch just updated their website. Oh, it’s a fantastic website, full of wonderful information. Just not any of the old information. And sadly, some of the old links have been hijacked and are being used for nefarious purposes.

Oh, yeah…heads are going to roll.

What’s sad about the whole thing is there are now hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of reference page links that people are searching and they’re getting frustrated not finding the information. Those are links that have been indexed by Google or are in some command file or posted on some website or Facebook page as reference.

Then you click on it. 

“Son of a biatch” 

Yup, the frustration of not being directed to the right page is rather annoying isn’t it. Oh, but you’re on a mission to find the information so down the rabbit hole you go. Or at least I did.

Last night I scrolled through over 50 military installation’s Facebook pages, and went to their About section to find their website URL. Then I clicked on that URL. Here’s what I would get “Server Can’t Be Found“, “404 That Page Doesn’t Exist“, or Google just kept freezing up because it couldn’t find anything.

So here you have one of the world’s greatest military branches and they couldn’t even take the time to properly update their website to include old links. UGGGHH!

Then you have to wonder how many links were rendered useless? And how many times the military has done this? The pages of information that just disappeared is probably in the millions.

All that money that was spent keeping those pages updated…than POOF gone. And that’s just one military branch. But, what about all the people who’s websites reference those old links? Yup, now they have to spend money to update their website with the correct information.

Now you have soldiers who can’t find the right information, civilians who are being misdirected to pages that no longer work and companies who now need to spend money cleaning up the military’s mess.