Halloween Links

It's that time of year when all the ghosts start coming out of the attics.

I just updated the Salt Lake Halloween and Denver Halloween pages. I was surprised to find that many of the haunted houses are already up and running. The Halloween season seems to start earlier and earlier each year.

I suspect that the Internet is part of the cause of the trend. There is generally a lag between when you make a website and it appears in the search engine. So, if you want your web site to show up on search engines, you need to have it up and running several months before Halloween and you need to aggressively seek links to the site in September.

Shipping is the big problem for online costume shops. Online costume sales peak ten days before the holiday. To get those sales, your advertising has to be in full swing at the beginning of October.

The result is that what was once a single day event has prolonged into a long Halloween season.

Anyway, I cleaned up my Halloween links. After doing so, I checked the sites link report. The report shows that I've deleted 10,000 broken links to date. The report says I current display about 24,000 links and have deleted 10,000 of the links. About 30% of the sites I've added to the directory through the years have gone dark. That's sad.