Comments on: Textamerica linkrot, going commercial only, closing accounts, redirecting links

By: Crushing Krisis » Uncluttering

Crushing Krisis » Uncluttering — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 04:13:34 +0000

[…] from usual suspects: this week TDavid and I chatted about link rot and social networking. Kottke posted a highly addictive web-game, Bloxorz. I grew bored in 15 […]

By: peter

peter — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:46:16 +0000

This entire discussion has been a major topic on the CK-homefront, as I’ve been trolling through my archives all year to point my backlinks into WordPress (plus all sorts of other fun stuff like remastering old podcast audio).

I actually made a communications plan.

Seven years was an arbitrary pick, since that’s how old my blog currently is and I’m just getting started on the linkrot issue. Someone like you - a much more active linker - could do an interesting study by choosing a cross-section of links of different years of age to see where the rot levels off. (Kottke would be a good test-case; if I knew how to code this stuff up automatically I’d be smelling a memetacular side-project.)

I’ve always assumed that Google tacitly rewards sites that don’t cause rot simply because more functional links point into that site for a longer amount of time.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:11:44 +0000

Wow, Peter, you really have thought things through. Thank you for the in-depth, detailed feedback. I like the part about your 7-year plan. I’d be curious what the percentage of linkrot is over 7 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was around 90% of the links rotting which means if that is accurate there is going to be a ton of content pages on the web in 7 years with broken links. Sooner or later I also wouldn’t be surprised if the search engine algorithms figured this out and rewarded pages where links aren’t rotting.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:02:22 +0000

I completely share your hesitance to surrender any of my personal content to third-party sites because - no matter what promises they make to you - they’ll always be a third party. I learned my lesson when Yahoo bought GeoCities and I never looked back.

The result has been a lot of brute-forcing on my part to integrate all manner of typically third-party services into my website. I don’t mind using sites like FaceBook or MySpace, but I don’t make a habit of committing any sort of original content to them. The only major concession I’ve made in that regard is to Flickr, because no one’s going to get to see all of those photos arranged so well otherwise.

(Flickr would make such a killing with a branded server-app; of course, Blogger promised that for years, and I don’t know anyone who got one.)

As for Linkrot: I have a policy of never deleting, or even substantially editing, any past blogs. It’s not only to preserve the intent of my own writing, but to try to avoid causing linkrot for others. Even when I converted from Blogger to Wordpress I left my old archives up.

In general, if I hit potentially debilitating linkrot to some external form of my own content (or, even a *hint* of a future issue) I find a way to re-host the entirety content on my own server, as I did with prior audio and photos posted from my camera.

When it comes to linkrot to domains that have gone poof, or blogs that have rearranged their permalink structure, I plan to start re-linking to the corresponding content on Archive.org on a rolling seven-year lag basis. I’m not sure how I plan to handle sites that *are* still up now - do I trust that if they lasted for seven years they’ll last unto eternity? On the flipside, if no suitable link replacement exists the chances are I won’t even remember what the point of the link was, and the post will just live on with its dadaist self.