I’ve notice this happen a few times: I link to something at a major news organization like in this case with ABC and within a short amount of time the link is changed by the publisher. In the linked case above, the piece was written at the end of February and within 60 days the link was inactive and leading to an “article not found,” a semi-404 page at ABC.

Why?

My first thought: why would ABC move (or remove) content? Do they not want others on the web to link to it? If you read my piece it was clearly sending people (IE. traffic) their way without taking away from anything they were doing. It wasn’t like this piece had taken anything from their content and encroached on their space. Makes no sense whatsoever. I could maybe see if the piece had a huge portion of quoted text in the article or the deeplink somehow violated their Terms of Use?

In fact, this type of activity if the frequency increases, will cause bloggers to begin screencapping and caching pages because the minute the link is changed/removed it renders blog pieces like the ones above less useful (ok, useless in the above case) because a key part in the discussion is lost.

I can understand concerns about deeplinking for media like MP3 or videos where the bandwidth drain can be significant, but c’mon, changing the link to an article in a case as demonstrated here?

Why?

I’m also not a fan of closing comments on old posts. I know some bloggers say that this increases the frequency of spam when things are left open. Also it does invite people who will comment about stuff that happens long after the original piece was reported as if the author should have known better when writing the original piece.

The flipside? If I’d have closed down comments after 30 days then I wouldn’t have known the CEO of Myntz enjoyed my unshilled endorsement of their cool Myntz or about the situation below.

I want to thank a reader and blogger named Jose for researching and finding a suitable replacement for the broken link article. You can read Jose’s blog here . I subscribed yesterday and he then stopped by here.

I’m always on the lookout for interesting bloggers to add to my aggregator. Thank you for helping me correct link broken past content that lives on in the search engines and was broken by ABC. Since it wasn’t an outright 404 error, a link checker wouldn’t have caught this.

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