Most of the time, when thinking of users and driving traffic to your site, the focus is on new, engaging, and frequently treated content. However the role of old content in driving traffic is now growing in importance. As sites like Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and TinyURL give users the power to bookmark (forever) and share links it is becoming harder to ‘lose’ URLs. Cool YouTube videos, blog posts, articles, microsites, campaign landing pages are now leaving permanent marks across the web. Shared bookmarks can live on in your Twitter archive, unearthed via searches. The links users create to this web property may outlive the campaign itself for which it was created. What does this mean? This means when giving a web property a URL companies should be prepared to make it a permanent one, especially if it’s the type of thing people will pass around or talk about. Even if it’s not possible to keep the page live, then at least a ‘washup’ page should live there in its place. The page should tell users what used to live there, and point them towards some useful or related destinations instead of a usual error page which normally acts as a dead end. With more and more viral properties being created this relatively cheap tactic could help deliver more visitors to your site as well as create a smoother user and brand experience – remember, this old link may be the first time a user touches your brand.