What is link rot?
Link rot is what happens to links when nobody maintains them. A page links to a resource; years later the resource has moved, the site has been redesigned, the company has folded or the domain has been bought by someone selling something else. The link still exists, but it points at a 404, a redirect to nowhere or a page that no longer says what it said. Studies of the web consistently find that a large share of links older than a few years are dead.
It cuts both ways. Your outbound links rot as other sites change. The inbound links pointing at you rot every time you change a URL without redirecting it.
Why it matters
Why link rot matters
For readers it is a broken promise: a citation that leads to nothing, a resource that no longer exists. For search it is leakage. Every inbound link that breaks takes its equity with it, and every outbound link that breaks makes your page a little less trustworthy as a reference. Sites with a long history can lose a meaningful share of their authority to rot without anyone noticing, because nothing announces it.
It matters most for content meant to last. An evergreen guide, a glossary, a reference library: anything built to be cited for years is only as good as its links are in year five.
In practice
How link rot works in practice
- 01
Inbound first. Before any redesign or migration, map every old URL to its new home and set 301 redirects, so links from other sites keep working. Afterwards, check Search Console and a backlink tool for links that return 404 and redirect them. Treat URL changes as something you do rarely and deliberately, because every change creates a new chance to rot.
- 02
Outbound second. Crawl your own site periodically with a tool that checks every external link and flags the dead ones. For each, find the new location, replace it with an archived copy, or remove it. Prefer linking to stable sources (official documentation, major publications, your own pages) over personal blogs and tools that may not survive. Add a check to your editorial process so that new content is not published with links that are already dead.
At RIOT
Link rot at RIOT
We run AltSounds, a music video channel, and Muvvoo, a music video database, and anything built on embedded video learns about rot quickly. Videos are pulled, channels close, uploads are replaced with new IDs. Keeping a library of that kind honest means checking continually rather than once, and the same habit applies to every link on this site.
Watch out
What people get wrong about link rot
Assuming it is someone else's problem. The links you control (your own URLs and your own outbound references) are where most of the damage happens, and both are fixable. The other mistake is fixing a dead link by deleting the sentence. The reference existed because it was useful; find where the resource went or point to an archive. Finally, people treat a redesign as a chance for "clean" URLs and break a decade of inbound links on launch day.
