Authoring Webpages/Preventing link rot

< Authoring Webpages

If you maintain a web site, or if you use links to other web sites (like in a blog or on a wiki), then you could suffer from link rot. 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. Link rot particularly affects free web hosts, like GeoCities, where people lose interest in maintaining their site.

Discovering

Detecting link rot for a given URL may be difficult using automated methods. If a URL is accessed and returns back an HTTP 200 (OK) response, it may be considered accessible, but the contents of the page may have changed and may no longer be relevant. Some web servers also return a soft 404, a page returned with a 200 (found) response (instead of a 404) that indicates the URL is no longer accessible. In the end, the only reliable way to test that a link is still valid is to click through and check it.

Combating

Webmasters

A number of basic rules can help webmasters to reduce link rot, including:

Citing URLs

When linking you should avoid citing "unstable" Internet references. There are several approaches that you can take to avoid introducing link rot:

Tools

There are a number of tools that can be used to combat link rot by archiving web resources:

Modern management

On Wikipedia, and other Wiki-based websites only external links still present a maintenance problem. Wikipedia uses a clear color system with internal links, so the user can see if the link is live before clicking on it. If referencing an old website or dated information, users can externally link to pages in the Internet Archive, allowing for a reliable permanent link.

References

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