What You Should Know About Link Rot

In the real world, you need new issues of the Yellow Pages as new businesses arrive and some of the old businesses close operations. It's the same online—new websites pop up and old ones change URLs, content, and ownership every now and then.

Link rot is applied to the situation of gradual disappearance of resources to which existing links point. When you click such a link, you can get a page not found error or an entirely new page if the target has changed ownership and content has been revamped.

Studies have estimated that every month, nearly a thousand links disappear from the Web. None of us wants the links in our blogs and websites to point to non-existent or irrelevant resources. Therefore, we should add link rot checking to our list of blog maintenance tasks. Let's see how in this article.

Broken Link Maintenance

In order to completely correct link rot, you need an intelligent application, such as the IBM Peridot, which actually replaces your outdated links with correct, information-rich links to new web content.

Here are various ways in which you can actually protect your blog from link rot.

1. Use links to the Wayback Machine, Archive.org, which keeps an archive of thousands of websites and their entire content in permanent, accessible links.

2. Keep track of your links with a link protection tool such as the Xenu Link Sleuth or a sitemap generator.

3. Always set your blog to have permalink structure. Most blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger are enabled for this by default, so you don't have to change anything.

4. Use the canonical forms of URLs.

5. Stick to the standard procedures of 301 redirects and 404 error pages on your website.

Conclusion

You should check for broken links and link rot at least once in two months for your blog. Better to do it more often if you have a huge website or blog. Several broken links doesn't sound like a good web practice to search engines as well as normal users.

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