How to clean up your Mass.gov documents

This guide describes how to audit your agency’s Mass.gov documents to find any that are outdated, redundant, or trivial. These audits ensure your constituents always have access to accurate and relevant information.

Most state agencies publish a lot of documents. Over time, these files can pile up and cause problems. For example:

• A document you published years ago points to a link that no longer exists
• Another one tells you how to apply to a defunct program
• An old document states a much older version of a policy. It contradicts other documents you have published that say the new policy. The version constituents find changes depending on what they happen to search in Google.

This guide will show you how to assess your Mass.gov documents to find and address redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) files.

Create a document inventory

The first thing to do is create an inventory of documents you’ve published. Then, you can review the inventory to decide what to update or remove.

Before you export your inventory

The Mass.gov content management system (CMS) allows you to export a full list of your agency’s published documents. Before you do that, you can try to trim down your list by unpublishing obviously irrelevant documents. Two examples of these types of documents are:

• Documents missing files. In our CMS, a document is 2 parts: the file and its metadata (e.g. title, date published, author, associated organization, etc.) Some documents have metadata, but the file is missing. This is obviously not what’s intended.
• Documents that are published but not linked on a Mass.gov page are still published. These can appear in search engines.

CMS reports for authors allow you to easily find these documents: 

• Documents with no binary file (no file attached)
• Orphaned documents (not linked on a page). The CMS knowledge base also has a piece on finding and fixing orphaned documents.

If a document appears in these reports, it might mean somebody meant to unpublish it. Check to see if you can remove it now. This will make your audit more manageable. You might also find documents that should be easy to find. You can fix them by adding the right file or linking them to appropriate pages.

Export your inventory

Your next step is to export your updated list of documents from the All Documents page. You can work with the export in Excel. 

Prepare your inventory for a ROT audit

The inventory you downloaded is already filled with valuable metadata to help you audit and manage your documents. But a few additions will make it more powerful. Add columns for “notes,” “ROT status,” “action,” “priority,” and “level of effort” to organize your work.

Example of additional columns:

File name	Notes	ROT status	Action	Priority	Level of Effort
New & improved program 2025			Keep
New and improved program 2025	Duplicate of "New & improved program 2025.”	Redundant	Delete	Low	Low
Policy one-pager	This info will be more accessible as a Mass.gov page		Convert to a webpage	Medium	High
Draft stakeholder presentation	This is a draft slide deck attached to a Mass.gov Event page. Either get rid of it or replace it with the final version presented at the meeting.	Trivial	Update / Delete	Medium	Low
New program 2022 brochure	Program is defunct now.	Obsolete	Delete	High	Low
Supplemental application form			Keep
ABCD program brochure	Program name has changed, but info is still valid		Update	High	Low

Conduct your audit

Take an initial pass through the documents listed in your inventory. Look for documents that can be easily unpublished based on their titles and other metadata. Try sorting by:

• Date columns. "Start date” (that is, first published) and “last revised” can help you identify documents that nobody’s updated in a while — a clue that a document might’ve been forgotten about.
• Title. Some titles will include dates, the names of old programs, or version names (“draft,” “version,” “final,” etc.). Others may be exact or near-exact matches with others, which points to duplicate files.

If this method helps you identify a lot of documents, pause your audit and focus on removing the ROT. Once you’ve done this, export a new, easier-to-manage inventory.

Once you’ve finished your quick scan, it’s time to slog through the inventory one document at a time. Here are some criteria to check when you evaluate each document:

• Is this document redundant? 
  • Does this share the same or closely related title with another document?
  • Is there another document with overlapping or identical content? 
  • Do your webpages already provide better and more meaningful coverage of this content?
• Is this document obsolete? 
  • Is the information still accurate? 
  • Does it reference past dates or expired programs? 
  • Does it reflect current branding or messaging?
  • Is this an outdated version of something newer?
• Is this document trivial? 
  • Is this content meaningful for your constituents? 
  • Would anyone notice if it disappeared?
  • Is there a meaningful scenario where someone would use this document?

How to use the “priority” and “level of effort” columns

Document audits sometimes produce a lot of work. We recommend adding these 2 columns, “priority” and “level of effort,” to help you manage this work. These criteria help you fill them out:

1. How many people it will affect (“priority” column)
2. How much of an impact it has on your brand (“priority” column)
3. How easy it will be to do (“level of effort” column)

Most auditors use a scale for each column, such as “low,” “medium,” and “high.” If you need to differentiate more, you can add more steps. For example, add “critical” to extend the priority scale or “minimal” to extend the level of effort scale.

You'll end up with a work plan that looks like this:

1. Easy changes that affect lots of people. (Example: Remove out-of-date and often downloaded documents.)
2. Difficult changes that affect lots of people. (Example: Replace out-of-date and often downloaded documents.)
3. Easy changes that affect some people. (Example: Link a document that nobody can find to multiple pages.)
4. Difficult changes that affect some people. (Example: Convert a document that few people use to HTML.) 
    

Note that you and your staff are included in “people.” Reducing the size of your inventory makes it easier to find and manage your documents. For example, removing documents that nobody’s using can still improve your experience as a content manager.

Reviewing your documents’ content

You’ll likely need to open some documents and review their content to figure out if they are ROT. Check for things like:

• Outdated friendly URLs
• Broken links
• Old program names/references
• Screenshots of outdated websites or applications

Update your inventory as you go. 

This is tedious work and illustrates why it is so important to keep documents well managed. Small, frequent versions of this project are much cheaper than infrequent, large audits.

Other tools to round out your inventory

These tools can help you learn more about your documents or target specific issues.

Pages linking here

Each document in the Mass.gov CMS has its own Pages linking here report that lists pages it’s linked from. Important caveat: The document has to be correctly linked to appear here. Check this before removing a document to help prevent broken links.

Siteimprove policies

Siteimprove policies are another way to target documents with specific issues. Like the CMS reports, there's a catalog of prebuilt filtered reports. These include things like outdated documents and certain file types. You can also create custom policies to search for other criteria like pages linking to your document’s URL or title. This last use helps catch documents that are incorrectly linked.  

Date published:	June 5, 2025