For bloggers that use WordPress, especially if you’ve been blogging more than a year, here’s a plugin you might find helpful: broken link checker. Whenever you’re logged into the WordPress Admin area, this handy plugin will spider all the links inside posts in your blog and report back which links are broken.

 

Linkrot is a huge problem with most websites but blogs are among the worst.

Problems linkrot creates

For those reading who don’t know what linkrot is: this is what happens when a link is made to a page that is no longer available. Sites go offline, pages get changed or deleted all the time but when a blog post relies on a link as the principle context, this creates broken archive posts. Who cares? New readers who arrive at these posts via search and existing readers going back through the archives. Why have archives if many of the archive posts are broken.

I’ve long wondered what is the best way was to deal with linkrot. As a reader, I don’t want to read some post that makes no sense without the link. I feel cheated in a way. When blog posts like these return highly in search results the feeling is worsened. Am I obligated to clean this up? I think so. What do you think?

The broken link checker strikes thru these broken links in the post view and offers several options to be able to deal with the issue. In the WP admin area visit Manage->broken links to see the total list of broken links.

Linkrot in the backyard

How big a problem was this at this blog?

Out of 4,844 posts made over the last 5+ years and the thousands of links a rather disappointing 16.3% of them are dead as of this writing. That’s not something that made me go hmm, it made me cringe. I knew the problem was there and have written about linkrot here before, but was hoping there were a lot less dead links.

How big is the problem at your blog?

What other bloggers are doing about dead links

I asked what other bloggers three questions doing on Twitter:

1. How are you handling dead links?
2. How often do you scan your blog for dead links?
3. Do you edit old posts?

These questions were aggregated to FriendFeed. Click the image to go to the original twitter message (which hopefully won’t become linkrot someday in the future):

 

 

My reply for @irishstu - never check for linkrot? Don’t you think that makes it harder for readers to follow when the link is important to the context? His response:

 

What should be plan for dealing with linkrot?

My thinking is to go through and remove the links that are permanently broken (site is down) and/or replace with a Google cache link or WayBackMachine link when possible. This way readers would be able to understand the context of the original posts. I don’t want to delete any of these posts, even if the meaning is gone without the often all important external link, because that would just create dead links for somebody else on the web that may have linked to the post.

But what happens to posts where there was little more than the link? Should I editorialize these posts and describe what used to be there?

Going to throw this out to readers and other bloggers and evaluate recommendations from others. Meanwhile, if you see a link flagged as dead by the plugin, it should have a line through it.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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