Screw ‘netiquette’! Putting weblinks in blog posts is a waste of effort

This weekend, I wasted several hours removing broken weblinks from my articles on Tech-media-tainment. Most of the dead weblinks were originally to news articles. But now they lead to 404 error pages.
It’s always been good netiquette (internet etiquette) to provide links to articles you are discussing. It gives readers additional context and resources to get more information on a subject.
But after my most recent purge of bad weblinks, I’ve decided to limit when I provide them in the future. I’ll provide enough information for readers to do an internet search but not use hypertext coding. That means citing the publication, headline and date of a story, but not a weblink. Over the years too many weblinks become unusable.
Having too many broken links on a website is bad for the user experience and can negatively affect a website’s search ranking. A high number of broken links signals to search engines that your website is not well-maintained, and it can hinder how search engines crawl and index your pages.
My latest search for broken links using BrokenLinkCheck.com flagged 564 bad weblinks.
Some I couldn’t fix because they involved embedded Twitter/X or Instagram posts. A lot of celebrities appear to have deleted their Twitter accounts, for instance.
However, the link checker probably undercounted the number of useless links because many links I manually deleted had automatically redirected to publisher homepages.
The link rot problem was worse on the older blog pages, which makes sense. I’ve been posting to Tech-media-tainment since November 2008.
In some older posts where I had linked to numerous news articles, I had to delete most of the links because they didn’t work anymore.
In some links that did work, the articles were missing media such as photos, slideshows and video.
Some offenders who broke the weblinks on their end included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization, Creative Commons and the CES trade show.
Repeat offenders among publishers included Bloomberg Businessweek, Entertainment Weekly, Gizmodo, GQ, Mental Floss and The Onion.
Some interesting smaller websites that I had highlighted years ago have been taken over by spam sites or gambling websites. Others just said that their URL was for sale.
I wish the Blogger platform, which Tech-media-tainment uses, would include a built-in broken link checker and a simple way to remove bad weblinks. That sounds like something that artificial intelligence would be great for.
However, as I’ve written previously, Google doesn’t seem interested in investing in Blogger these days.

Related articles:

Online content not safe from deletion (March 4, 2025)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free (March 2, 2025)

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers (March 1, 2025)

Content on the internet has an expiration date (Feb. 23, 2025)

The internet is awash in broken links (Oct. 1, 2024)

Photo: ERR 404 license plate in Australia. (Photo via Creative Commons from Flickr user Michael Coghlan.)

Online content not safe from deletion

When I was starting out in the news business and worked at daily newspapers, older articles were available in bound copies of newspaper editions.
Much older articles were saved to microfilm or microfiche. You had to use special machines to read the miniaturized reproductions and to make photocopies.
There was no computer text search so you had to know the date or approximate date of the article or event to find what you needed.
The good news was that there was a permanent record of what had been reported on and written about.
Many journalists, including myself, kept physical “clips” of the articles from the newspapers and print publications that they worked for.
The rise of the internet brought with it the wonders of computer-aided search. All was good until databases like news website archives started going offline. That has led to the scourge of broken weblinks and unavailable information.
Solutions for the problem include archiving organizations such as the venerable Internet Archive. Others include Archive.Today, Archive Team and Webrecorder. But content owners must take advantage of those services.
And those are just Band-Aid fixes to a bigger problem.

Photo: Pew Internet Research chart from Chartr.

Related articles:

How to disappear completely. The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random? (The Verge; Dec. 18, 2024)

The internet is littered with ‘dead links’ (Fast Company; May 28, 2024)

Spotify’s layoffs put an end to a musical encyclopedia, and fans are pissed (TechCrunch; Feb. 12, 2024)

CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search (Gizmodo; Aug. 9, 2023)

Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-like music guessing game it bought last year (TechCrunch; April 14, 2023)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free

I started Tech-media-tainment on Google’s Blogger platform at the tail end of the blogging craze in late 2008. Blogger offered the best-available free platform for anyone to create a blog on any subject.
I’m still happy with Blogger after all these years, but it clearly is a low priority for Google now. Google hasn’t changed Blogger much in that time, but it has become less functional over that period. I can’t do things on Blogger that I used to be able to, such as edit a post from that post’s published page or place photos within body text just by putting my cursor where I wanted the photo to go.
But it still does the job I need it to do and it’s still free. I wouldn’t blog if I had to pay to do it.
In fact, Google used to pay me through an ad-sharing arrangement by having AdSense on Tech-media-tainment. Between 2012 and 2016, I received a check whenever my share of ad revenue topped $100. In all, I received five checks.
But after I wrote a few blog posts looking at the public figures that the porn industry liked to parody in their videos, Tech-media-tainment was de-monetized. My blog didn’t feature actual pornography but the subject matter apparently violated the rules for AdSense. So that relationship ended.
Blogging was still cool when I started Tech-media-tainment but it was soon replaced in the zeitgeist as creators moved to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others. Many creators soon became social media influencers.
Back when I started Tech-media-tainment, Blogger used to spotlight interesting blogs on the service. But it ended the Blogs of Note column around 2011.
I’m just happy that Blogger is still operating. It helps to have a wealthy conglomerate like Alphabet backing it. I had previously tried free blogging services GeoCities, Xoom and Soup.io, but they all went out of business. Lots of bloggers moved to WordPress, but that costs money.

Photo: Blogger start page.

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers

As Google continues to exert significant control over what web surfers see, publishers big and small have had to become experts in search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their content gets discovered and shown. But that’s become a losing battle.
Continual changes to the Google search algorithm have shifted which publishers benefit and which are left out.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of smaller websites complain that recent Google algorithm changes have led to a big drop in traffic to their websites.
Some have called it quits, like entertainment news sites Giant Freakin Robot and Quiet Earth and Apple news website iMore.
Giant Freakin Robot said its internet traffic went from more than 20 million unique visitors a month to just a few thousand a month because of changes to Google search.
“Nearly every independently owned entertainment news publisher is in the same situation, in one way or another,” website founder Joshua Tyler wrote in a Nov. 4 post. “Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way.”
Another worthwhile entertainment news site that has been negatively impacted by Google’s algorithm changes is The TV Answerman, run by Phillip Swan. The website has lost 90% of its traffic and revenue due to Google’s abrupt and dramatic change to its search algorithms, Swann said in an Oct. 11 blog post.
I understand why Google changes its search algorithm. It wants to weed out bad actors from gaming its search engine. But it doesn’t appear to be working very well. Content from legitimate publishers has been buried and spam content from other sites is being promoted.
Plus, Google is favoring some large publishers because they have legal teams that can fight it or can sign business deals with the search giant.
This is not the open internet we were promised.

Photos: Cover of “Internet: A First Discovery Book” by Scholastic (2000), top;
Poster using the book’s cover as seen in 2008. (Photo by Leslie Lindballe via Creative Commons.)