Link rot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Link rot is the process by which links on a website gradually become irrelevant or broken as time goes on, because websites that they link to disappear, change their content or redirect to new locations.

The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update webpages so that they become out-of-date, containing information that is old and useless, and that clutters up search engine results. This process most frequently occurs in personal homepages and is prevalent in free webhosts such as GeoCities, where there is no financial incentive to fix link rot.

1 Discovering
2 Modern management
3 In academic citations
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Discovering

Detecting link rot for a given URL may be difficult using automated methods. If a URL is accessed and returns back an HTTP 200 (OK) response, it may be considered accessible, but the contents of the page may have changed and may no longer be relevant. Some web servers also return a soft 404, a page returned with a 200 (OK) response (instead of a 404) that indicates the URL is no longer accessible. Bar-Yossef et al. (Bar-Yossef et al., 2004) developed a heuristic for automatically discovering soft 404s.

[edit] Modern management

On Wikipedia, and other Wiki-based websites broken external links still present a maintenance problem. Wikipedia uses a clear color system with internal links, so the user can see if the link is live before clicking on it. If referencing an old website or dated information, users can externally link to pages in WebCite or the Internet Archive, allowing for a reliable permanent link.

[edit] In academic citations

A number of studies have been performed showing the prevalence of link rot in academic literature:

Robert P. Dellavalle, Eric J. Hester, Lauren F. Heilig, Amanda L. Drake, Jeff W. Kuntzman, Marla Graber, Lisa M. Schilling (2003). "Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References". Science 302 (5646): 787-788.

Steve Lawrence, David M. Pennock, Gary William Flake, Robert Krovetz, Frans M. Coetzee, Eric Glover, Finn Arup Nielsen, Andries Kruger, C. Lee Giles (2001). "Persistence of Web References in Scientific Research". Computer 34 (2): 26-31.

Frank McCown, Sheffan Chan, Michael L. Nelson, and Johan Bollen (2005). "The Availability and Persistence of Web References in D-Lib Magazine". Proceedings of the 5th International Web Archiving Workshop and Digital Preservation (IWAW'05).

Diomidis Spinellis (2003). "The Decay and Failures of Web References". Communications of the ACM 46 (1): 71-77.

[edit] References

Gunther Eysenbach and Mathieu Trudel (2005). "Going, going, still there: using the WebCite service to permanently archive cited web pages". Journal of Medical Internet Research 7 (5).

Ziv Bar-Yossef, Andrei Z. Broder, Ravi Kumar, and Andrew Tomkins (2004). "Sic transit gloria telae: towards an understanding of the Web’s decay". Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, 328–337.

Wallace Koehler (2004). "A longitudinal study of web pages continued: A consideration of document persistence". Information Research 9 (2).

John Markwell and David W. Brooks (2002). "Broken Links: The Ephemeral Nature of Educational WWW Hyperlinks". Journal of Science Education and Technology 11 (2): 105-108.