Avoid a bad experience

Link rot is a term you don't hear very often, but it is something that happens more often than you sometimes realize. It's quite normal to deal with a link to refer to a web page, we do it every day. We also find it quite self-evident that after a few periods this link still functions. Yet this is less the case than you might think. A good comparison would be one of your playlists on YouTube, for example. How many times have you had a song missing? This also happens with other types of links, for example from company websites that have been archived or if the structure of the website has changed. You click on an old link or backlink and you get the infamous 404 error.

There are several reasons why link rot occurs. One of the reasons is that a website has not renewed its contract for its domain name. A page is deleted or a website is stopped.

Can link rot be prevented?

In short, no, this cannot be prevented. A longer answer is that it is never possible to predict which sites will ultimately disappear in the future. You can assume that sites such as Wikipedia will exist longer than, for example, small blog sites or links to images.

Different types of link rot

There are two types of link rot: internal link rot and external link rot. Internal link rot is easier to find and manage because you can adjust it yourself. Finding internal link rot is done using crawlers. For example with a crawler from Moz.

The other variant of link rot is called external link rot. This is when links to other pages have a 404 message. To solve this, you can replace the link with a link that points to another domain or remove the link completely.