November 6, 2003

Link Rot

Christopher L. Filkins

Periodically web sites die, get mis-published to the wrong server, their content simply reconfigured, mis-templated, or placed behind a pay to play barrier. Link rot is a big problem for bloggers.

David Raynes has a great little tutorial for preventing internal link rot when managing a blog with Movable Type. Of course if you aren't as technically adept as David but have cash at hand you can pay someone to keep your link rot to minimum.

But the real problem is the link rot in external publications over which bloggers have no control. JD Lasica has a small list of newspapers which do not rot their links.

While working on another project not too long ago I was forced to manually go through a whole slew of links I'd created back in 1998-2000 and I found that virtually all of them were gone. Not only did this prove to be a big hassle to try and recover these resources but most of them were simply gone completely without so much as a itty bitty presence in the Way Back Web. I had 2 observations from this:

  1. Either 3 years is the onset of link death or the dotcom failures of that period were a watershed event for link death.
  2. Some day (10 yrs, 30, 50?) there will be people whose areas of expertise and profession will be reconstructing the dark matter of the early web .

I recently discovered a link in my archives to a Yahoo News story about a python swallowing a baby. I don't even remember the story but when I went to the link to see why in the world I'd link to such a thing the link was dark. Fortunately with a little toodling around in Google I found the story. (It's the little victories I tell myself!) I still don't know why I linked to the story in the first place.

What do you do to combat link rot? Do you make personal archives of these documents to which you link? Do you know of any software which will automatically do this for you as part of your blogging routine? Is this a value added tool you would pay for?

Posted by filchyboy at November 6, 2003 10:36 PM
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