Links rot?
Photo Credit: Brian Smithson (Old Geordie) via Compfight cc
According to a story in the New York Times that posted at the end of September, 49% of the links included in Supreme Court decisions no longer work – they lead to either a 404 not found page or to something completely different than what the original author of the decision expected. This is called link rot and it can happen to your website, too, if you don’t check things regularly! Clicking on links in your site on a regular basis can let you know if any of them have gone rotten, but if you have a large site, that can be time consuming and tedious.
There are, of course, a couple of free software packages that you can download to check on links for you. These will tell you if the resource you are linking to is gone – giving you that dreaded 404 error page – but nothing will tell you that a website has gone out of business and is now owned by someone completely different showing something completely unrelated to your link.… Read the rest