Recommendations Expire

A recommendation is written on one day and read on hundreds of others.

On the day it's written, it's accurate.

The product does what the post says.

The price is what the post says.

The support is good, the features are there, and the person writing it has used it recently enough to know.

Then time passes, and the post doesn't.

Products change.

Prices go up.

The feature that was the whole reason for the recommendation gets moved to a higher tier, or removed.

A company gets bought and the thing that made it good quietly stops being true.

Meanwhile the post keeps saying what it said, in the same confident voice, to someone reading it for the first time today.

That reader has no way of knowing the page is out of date.

They're trusting it as if it were written this morning.

If they buy on the strength of something that stopped being true a year ago, it isn't the product they'll blame.

It's the person who told them.

This is one of the less obvious risks of recommending things for a living.

The link keeps earning long after the reason for it has changed.

And a recommendation that's gone wrong costs more than the commission it made, because it spends trust that took a long time to build.

A few habits help.

Put a date on anything that makes a claim about a product.

Not only the date it was published, but the date the claim was last checked.

It tells the reader how fresh the information is, and it tells the writer when it's due.

Keep a simple list of every product recommended and every page it appears on.

When something changes, that list is how every mention gets found, instead of just the two that come to mind.

Check the pages that earn the most first.

They're the ones being read the most, which makes them the ones doing the most damage if they're wrong.

And when a recommendation stops being deserved, say so.

Update the page.

Say what changed.

Suggest something else, or nothing at all.

A line that says “this used to be my pick, and here's why it isn't anymore” does more for credibility than a glowing review ever could.

Writing the recommendation is the easy part.

Keeping it true is the job.