I recently came across a post on Ctrl+Shift+3 from someone who had found an old backup of their del.icio.us bookmarks (https://ctrlshift3.com/post/cQHW0GSYNypR). The conclusion was concise and predictable: roughly 75 percent broken links and 80 percent obsolete technology. It made me sigh, because it reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: link rot.
Link rot is simply what happens when links that once worked stop taking you to the information they originally pointed to. A website disappears, an article is removed, a company changes its CMS, pages get reorganised or an entire domain simply vanishes. The result is the familiar 404 page, a redirect to somewhere irrelevant, or sometimes a completely different page at the same address.
And it happens a lot. A recent 20-year study of almost 2900 web citations found that accessibility dropped from 87 percent for citations less than five years old to only 38 percent for those more than ten years old. You can find the study here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S2050380626000220. That is quite a problem for something we tend to regard as permanent.
Why I don’t use URL shorteners
Link rot is also one reason why I prefer using the actual URL when I link to another website instead of putting a URL-shortening service in between. There is a very practical advantage: you can immediately see where you are going. A link beginning with w3.org, github.com or the website of a newspaper tells me considerably more than an address such as bit.ly/3Xf92Kd.
But there is another reason. A URL shortener adds an extra dependency. Instead of:
my website → source
you get:
my website → shortening service → source
That shortening service now controls all those redirects. If it disappears, changes the way it works, gets acquired, loses data or simply decides to discontinue the service, a potentially enormous collection of links can stop working overnight. It seems “slightly” strange to me to deliberately introduce another possible point of failure into something that is already rather fragile.
Of course, using the original URL doesn’t solve link rot either. If the original page disappears, the link still breaks. But at least there is one less organisation involved in keeping the link alive.
Keeping your own URLs boring
The Unattributed article “Digital Legacy: Link Rot Mitigation Issues” (https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/23/digital-legacy-link-rot-mitigation/) approaches the problem from the perspective of preserving a website over a long period. That is an interesting way of looking at it, because preventing link rot isn’t only about the sites we link to. It is also about the links other people create to us.
One of the most useful principles is actually very boring: don’t unnecessarily change URLs. If an article lives at a particular URL today, keeping it there for the next ten or twenty years is probably one of the best things you can do. The US Library of Congress makes the same recommendation: maintain stable URLs and, when a URL really has to change, redirect the old address to the new one. (https://www.loc.gov/programs/web-archiving/for-site-owners/creating-preservable-websites/)
That sounds obvious, but website redesigns have a remarkable ability to destroy perfectly good URL structures. A new CMS gets installed, /blog/interesting-article.html suddenly becomes /posts/2026/interesting-article, nobody bothers to create redirects, and thousands of old bookmarks and incoming links instantly become useless overnight.
Archive what matters
Another important defence against link rot is archiving. If I refer to something that is particularly important to an article, I can save the page in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/) or use a service such as Perma.cc (https://perma.cc/). That gives readers another route to the information if the original disappears.
This is especially useful for pages that are likely to change while keeping the same URL. Think of government policy pages, documentation, company announcements or so-called living documents. In those cases you can have something slightly different from link rot: content drift. The URL still works, but the information behind it is no longer what you originally referred to.
For sources like these, preservation guidance increasingly recommends keeping both the live URL and an archived snapshot. Have a look here for an interesting article about this topic: https://casrai.org/guides/link-rot-in-citations-and-how-to-prevent-it
For academic papers, reports and datasets, there is another option: use a persistent identifier such as a DOI whenever one exists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_identifier). The entire idea behind these identifiers is that the identifier remains the same even when the actual location of the document changes.
Give readers enough information to recover a link
There is also a wonderfully low-tech solution: don’t make the URL the only information you provide. When referring to an interesting article, mention its title, author and website. If the link dies in five years, someone can still search for it. If all I write is “read this” behind a hyperlink, the reader has almost nothing to work with once that link disappears.
The same applies to my own bookmarks. Saving only a URL isn’t particularly useful if that URL later breaks. A title, short note and perhaps publication date make the bookmark much more valuable as a record of what was actually there. Perhaps that old del.icio.us backup illustrates this perfectly. A dead URL on its own is almost meaningless. A dead URL combined with a title and description can still tell you what you once found interesting.
Check your old links
There is one final, rather mundane solution: occasionally check links. There are plenty of tools that can crawl a website and report broken external and internal links. Examples are LinkChecker (https://github.com/linkchecker/linkchecker) or Broken Link Checker (https://github.com/stevenvachon/broken-link-checker). For a small personal website you could run such a check every now and then and repair the links that matter. Sometimes the article simply moved. Sometimes there is an archived version. Sometimes another reliable source covers the same information.
But I wouldn’t turn this into an endless maintenance project either. Because ultimately link rot cannot be solved completely. Someone else’s website can disappear tomorrow. A company can close. A domain registration can expire. An organisation can deliberately remove twenty years of old material. Even archives cannot preserve everything, particularly today’s highly dynamic websites.
Perhaps the goal therefore shouldn’t be to create a Web in which no link ever dies. It should be to make links less disposable. Use stable URLs. Avoid unnecessary intermediaries. Redirect old pages when you move them. Archive important sources. Use persistent identifiers when they exist. And leave enough context around a link so somebody has a chance of finding the information again. Because the Web may look permanent when we use it every day. That old del.icio.us backup suggests otherwise.