I've linked to lots of external websites over the years. It would be lovely if all those resources stayed online forever but, sadly, they don't. Websites rearrange content, or it gets deleted, or sites go offline.
I periodically check every link on my blog. If a link no longer works, I redirect it to The Internet Archive so that users can see what the link used to point to.
This page automatically updates every few weeks to show how bad the known link rot is on my website. It counts all the links and sees which ones now go to archive.org.
Link Rot levels are 5.92%
Data
|
Year |
Total
External Links |
Total
Archived Links |
%age Archived |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 131 | 48 | 36.64% |
| 2009 | 1,233 | 232 | 18.82% |
| 2010 | 907 | 179 | 19.74% |
| 2011 | 1,063 | 165 | 15.52% |
| 2012 | 1,224 | 179 | 14.62% |
| 2013 | 1,680 | 205 | 12.20% |
| 2014 | 1,760 | 115 | 6.53% |
| 2015 | 2,278 | 153 | 6.72% |
| 2016 | 1,979 | 125 | 6.32% |
| 2017 | 1,198 | 57 | 4.76% |
| 2018 | 1,364 | 43 | 3.15% |
| 2019 | 1,415 | 44 | 3.11% |
| 2020 | 2,610 | 96 | 3.68% |
| 2021 | 2,870 | 85 | 2.96% |
| 2022 | 2,592 | 53 | 2.04% |
| 2023 | 1,974 | 25 | 1.27% |
| 2024 | 1,853 | 18 | 0.97% |
| 2025 | 1,972 | 24 | 1.22% |
| 2026 | 1,181 | 6 | 0.51% |
3 thoughts on “Link Rot”
@Edent very cool!! must. resist. urge. to. do. this. on. my. website…
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.social
@Edent I feel like there are some way bigger drop-offs just before your blog started – anecdotally it seems rare to find a working link dated pre-2005, outside of some specific sites like university pages or newspaper archives
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.social
@Edent Good reminder to check my own, thanks. The site generator II use does support checking, so I should just go and do that.
| Reply to original comment on cosocial.ca