What is Link Rot?
Link rot (sometimes spelled linkrot) describes the way in which links to web pages routinely decay or become unavailable over time. For the average programmer, citing a website doesn’t necessarily mean the link will stay active forever. Most people searching a site get frustrated when they click and links on find they don’t exist, and examples of link rot can be found in a variety of sources. They may occur on any kind of website but they also tend to occur in things like scholarly publications, where failure to link to cited sources can diminish scholarly intent of a paper. One trouble with link rot is that some large sites like newspapers routinely move links to other addresses and don’t leave a connection to them, or they may charge money for articles that were once available for free, as soon as they’re archived. This can mean initial links take people to a different location, simply no longer work, or limit access to paying customers. For those conducting research on the Internet,
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 usabilit
