In school, we’re taught to “cite your sources.” That’s easy in the internet age through weblinks. But the problem of link rot – weblinks that stop working – has caused a breakdown in the attribution process.
It’s common courtesy (good netiquette) to include weblinks in articles so readers can easily get more information on a subject or to check out the original source of information. But many weblinks go bad over time as companies change content management systems, remove content, or even go out of business.
I’ve seen it firsthand at Tech-media-tainment. Whenever I run a broken link checker like BrokenLinkCheck.com, I find dozens, often hundreds, of broken links to fix on my blog.
It makes me wonder if I should even use weblinks in articles anymore. One reason not to do so is because Google down ranks websites that have a lot of broken links. Nobody wants that. And broken links provide a bad user experience.
One place on Tech-media-tainment where link rot is evident is with the websites that I’ve spotlighted as favorites over the years.
For instance, from August 2009 to November 2017, I spotlighted 300 interesting websites on Tech-media-tainment. Of those, 93 are no longer online. That’s 31% of the websites I spotlighted during that period that are no longer available.
Of the first 100 websites I wrote about, from August 2009 to July 2015, 35% are no longer available.
It just goes to show that content on the internet doesn’t have permanence. What’s here today could be gone tomorrow.
Photo: “Broken Link” tombstone in Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa, by Carl Wycoff. (Via Creative Commons)
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