You put up a website so you could get new clients. Then you added a blog. You went at it with the best of intentions, and you’ve done a good job of keeping it up to date-until recently.

Now the site is getting stale. The copyright date says “2009.” You haven’t updated your blog since early April. You’ve been busy. Being busy is typically a good thing.

Unfortunately, your web presence is starting to hurt you. It’s beginning to look like you moved on. It’s beginning to seem like you’ve taken a job elsewhere, fallen ill, or retired-or worse.

Suddenly, we aren’t as comfortable sending you a referral. We don’t want to give out your name if you’re not in the game. We don’t want prospective clients coming back to us complaining that we steered them in the wrong direction.

When we see a stale site, we simply move on to the next person on our list. We aren’t going to take the time to hunt you down and figure out what’s going on. We’re going to go with Plan B.What should you do? The website needs to look current. If you aren’t going to update the copyright date, then take it off (there probably isn’t anything critical there anyway). If there are other clues about when you last changed the site, get rid of them.

On the blog, if you’re going to take some time off, tell us. Put up a post indicating that you’re focusing on client work or other things. Let us know where we can find you on LinkedIn or Twitter. Tell us why you aren’t updating-we’ll understand. We may even think your services are more valuable because you’re so in demand.

The important thing is to avoid the appearance of a problem. We probably came to the site just to grab your email or phone number. Don’t throw us off track-that way, you’ll still get our referrals.