Link rot
From Free net encyclopedia
Link rot is the process by which links on a website gradually become irrelevant or broken as time goes on, because websites that they link to disappear, change their content or redirect to new locations.
The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update webpages so that they become out-of-date, containing information that is old and useless, and that clutters up search engine results. This process most frequently occurs in personal homepages and is prevalent in free webhosts such as GeoCities, where there is no financial incentive to fix link rot.
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Combating Link Rot
Webmasters
A number of basic rules can help webmasters to reduce link rot, including:
- Do not keep a hyperlink collection unless you are willing to look after it.
- Design your hyperlinks to be maintained, such as a central hyperlink collection.
- Do not link to sub-pages ("deep linking") unless you are confident that they will remain stable.
- Use hyperlink checker software or a Content Management System (CMS) with link checking included.
- Use permalinks.
- Put the right e-mail address or other contact information on the same page where the links are with specific information ("Found a bad link? Contact links@business.com and we'll fix it.")
- When changing domains, help others fix their link pages by spreading the information well ahead of the migration, and use HTTP status codes to communicate that a page has moved (eg. "301: Moved Permanently").
Authors citing URLs
A number of studies have shown how wide-spread link rot is in academic literature (see below). Authors of scholarly publications should avoid citing "unstable" Internet references. There are several approaches authors may take to avoid introducing link rot into their work:
- Avoid using URLs that point to resources on a researcher's personal home page.
- Use Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs) and Digital object identifiers (DOIs) whenever possible.
- Use WebCite to permanently archive and retrieve cited Internet references [1].
Tools
There are a number of tools that can be used to combat link rot by archiving web resources:
- Archive-It, a 'Web-archive-on-demand' service created by the Internet Archive [2], allows users to prospectively initiate the archiving process.
- hanzo:web is a personal web archiving service that can archive a single web resource or an entire website.
- Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine that allows users to save important web resources.
Studies of Link Rot in Academic Citations
A number of studies have been performed showing the prevalence of link rot in academic literature: