Link rot is the process by which web links are broken or becomes invalid over time. According to an estimate 6% of the links are rotten and affects 28.5% of all web pages sampled. (These surveys are old - based in 1999, but anyone who has been browsing the web knows that it hasn't got any better since then)
As of November 6, 2006, roughly 10% of the external sites linked to by Wikipedia were broken. Link rot happens for many reasons. The company owning the website may got out of business or get acquired. The webmaster might decide to reorganize the directories (with no redirect setup) or change the underlying web technology (for eg. from asp to php) Why do I care?
If you are a webmaster or a blogger, you have reasons to care.
- Link rot reduces the usability of the web and is cited as
one of the biggest problems in using the web by 60% of the users in a survey.
- It can also affect the reputation of a website and potentially lower the search engine rankings.
- According to Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, link rot discourages linking, and contributes to dissolving the very fabric of the Web
While it may not be possible to completely eliminate link rot, you certainly can reduce link rot by constantly maintaining your website and following a set of policies for internal URLs.
1) Future proof your URLs: As a webmaster, the internal links are your responsibility. Any URL published to the external world should be independent of the current underlying implementation including the technology used, directory structure etc. This W3C document explains a set of standards that will help in minimizing changes to your URLs in the future
2) Run a links validator regularly: Check the validity of your links - both internal and external - on a regular basis. There are several tools available for validating the links on your website.
3) Update the broken links: Once you have identified the dead links, there maybe several options available depending on the nature of your site and the site linked to. The link may be pointed to the new location of the page, if available or a cached copy of the page or an alternate website . The last option might be to just delink with a note that the website is no longer available, instead of the user figuring that out. Pagefactor
Finding a new location, a cached copy or an alternate site can be tedious and time consuming, and has to be repeated by every webmaster. This is where pagefactor.com can be useful. At pagefactor.com, you can not only check for an alternative location of a page, but also share a new location of a page with other webmasters.
