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.)
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