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A Decade of Dead Links

—Kelson Vibber, 2012-03-27

I turned on the broken link checker plugin at lunchtime, and let it run through the site over the next few hours* before checking back this evening.

Holy crap, there’s a lot of outdated links on this site! Over 300, in fact, linking to things like…

One of the dead links is, appropriately enough, to an article on top 10 web design mistakes. (I guess they missed one!)

#11 should be: Cool URIs don't change (W3C Style)

Another is actually on one of my articles on link rot from way back when.

Linkrot, Part Deux

And then there are the 700+ links that are being redirected, some of which should probably be updated, but some of which are certainly gateway pages — and some of which are probably pointing to a new site that took over the name, but not the content.

It’s often stated that once something goes up on the Internet, it’s there forever. But that’s not entirely true. What it is, is beyond your control. If someone else makes a copy, you can’t take it down (like the fable about releasing a bag of feathers from a mountain top, and then trying to collect all the feathers). But any individual copy — even the original — exists at the whim of whoever owns or maintains that site.

One question remains.

Do these dead links matter?

I think they do, for three reasons:

Tech

Linkrot

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Originally posted at K-Squared Ramblings

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