It is a good idea to occasionally review your content to make sure it is up-to-date. Sometimes, you might have a page that is not connected to the menu (e.g., you deleted the menu link but not the page itself; or you created a page and never added it to the menu) that gets forgotten about. These "orphaned" webpages may still appear in search results, providing website visitors with outdated information.

To review pages within Drupal:

  • When logged in, hover over Content in the admin toolbar (the paper icon).
  • Click Overview.
  • The Content Overview page shows you all of the content on your site. By default, this list is sorted by most recently updated.
    • Note: The "Author" of a page is the person who created the page (unless the Author field has been manually updated), not the person who last updated that page.
  • Click the Updated column header to sort by last updated.

This is a good place to review content that has not been updated recently. If you don't recognize a page, click the page title to view it, and see if the page still makes sense to keep. Check to see if the page is in a menu. If not, consider whether you may be linking to that page from within another page's content rather than from the menu.

Reviewing Files

Why?

It is a common occurrence for updated files to be uploaded to a website without removing the previous version. Even if the link to that previous version is removed, others may still be linking to your previous file, and it can still appear in search results. Imagine if you have a policy that was last updated in 2024, and you replace it with a new version that was updated in 2026. The previous version would have been appearing in search results for a couple of years, and is likely to continue appearing. Someone searching via Google and being taken directly to the file would not know that a new version has been uploaded to the website. It is best to remove outdated files, and back them up on your own computer if necessary rather than keeping them on the website.

To review files within Drupal:

It is a good idea to periodically review the files that are on your website. The easiest way to do this is:

  • When logged in, hover over your username in the top-right in the admin toolbar, then click View Profile.
  • Click the tab that says IMCE File Browser.
  • The IMCE File Browser page contains all of the files (image, documents, and otherwise) that have been uploaded to your website. By default, you will start in public://. Depending on how you have uploaded your files, you may see some within this folder. Many of your documents are likely within the docs folder (which has contains subfolders based on the months and years they were uploaded.
  • Browse through these folders to find your documents. You can click the Date column header to view larger lists of documents by date uploaded.
  • Double-click a file to open it if you need to further review it.
  • Click a file, and then use the Delete button to delete it from your website. The file will no longer be accessible. Any links to the file will become broken, so make sure you also identify any places where you linked to this file so that you can either update or remove those links.

Locating a file to remove:

Often, people will reach out about a file that someone found via Google or other search, and ask how they can find locate that file to remove it. Once you are in the IMCE File Browser, you can reference the URL of the file to determine which folders it is located within. The URL will typically be in the format: https://sitename.lehigh.edu/sites/default/files/docs/<yyyy-mm>/filename. That tells you that if you are starting in docs/, you would then click into the corresponding date folder, and then you should be able to find your file within there.

Using DubBot

Web & Mobile Services pays for a service called DubBot which crawls some of our websites every 6 days to check for accessibility issues, best practices, broken links, SEO issues, misspellings, etc. Note that DubBot uses a website's sitemap to find the pages to check. If you have an orphaned page on your site, it may not be detected by DubBot.

Not all Lehigh websites are monitored by DubBot. DubBot monitors the college websites, multiple stem and department websites, and other custom websites. We have submitted a sample of "standard" Drupal websites to DubBot to ensure that we have accessibility monitoring on our standard theme and functionality. I.e., if an issue is detected on one standard website, WMS makes changes that resolves this issue across all standard websites. Of course, individual website content itself still varies.

If your website is monitored by DubBot, it is a good idea to regularly review the reports and make changes to your website to address flagged concerns.

If your website is not monitored by DubBot and you are interested, reach out to WMS to learn more.