How annoying is it to click on a link on an old webpage only to discover that the page you're trying to open no longer exists? It must have existed at some point, but now it's vanished, gone, disappeared, forever. Maybe the page was deleted, or maybe the website reorganised itself, or maybe the URL changed without leaving a forwarding address, or maybe the original web domain expired. Whatever the reason, all you get now is a placeholder, a confused jumple of code or the dreaded 404 error page. Or, even worse, you arrive to discover that some spammy cybersquatter has bought up the old domain name [e.g. swishcottage.com] and is now lying in wait to bombard unsuspecting visitors with irrelevant advertising. How are the mighty fallen.
It's even worse when people descend on your webpage archive only to discover that half of your links no longer work. It looks so unprofessional. So I thought I'd do a survey to discover just how bad the problem of 'link rot' has become deep within my own website. I went back to my blog pages from May 2004 and May 2003, clicked on every site in sight and totalled up how many of the links still work one or two years later. And here are my results:
May 2004 [1 year ago] Total number of off-site links on main page = 520 Total number of links which still work = 450 [=87%]
May 2003 [2 years ago] Total number of off-site links on main page = 321 Total number of links which still work = 233 [=73%]
Which suggests that roughly 1 in 6 of weblinks disappear every year. To be honest that's better than I was expecting because I thought the annual web haemorrhage was far worse. But it still means that several great pages have been lost, or hidden, or pulled, or extinguished, and only the Wayback Machine can bring them back.
Blogs turn out to have a fairly better strike rate. Of the 20 blogs in my sidebar in May 2003, a quarter have shifted off tosomedifferentwebaddress and a further 15% have stoppedupdatingaltogether, but none of them have disappeared completely. Again, I thought the blog evaporation rate would be higher than that, so I'm pleasantly relieved to discover that it's not - or maybe I'm just good at picking long-stayers. In the meantime, why not check out the broken links on your own webpage here, before any more of them vanish forever.
