Information AboutLink Rot |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT LINK ROT | |
| world wide web | |
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The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update Webpage s so that they become out-of-date, containing information that is old and useless, and that clutters up Search Engine results. This process most frequently occurs in personal Homepage s and is prevalent in free webhosts such as GeoCities , where there is no financial incentive to fix link rot. DISCOVERING Detecting link rot for a given URL may be difficult using automated methods. If a URL is accessed and returns back an HTTP 200 (found) response, it may be considered accessible, but the contents of the page may have changed and may no longer be relevant. Some web servers also return a soft 404, a page returned with a 200 (found) response (instead of a 404 ) that indicates the URL is no longer accessible. Bar-Yossef et al. (Bar-Yossef et al., 2004) developed a heuristic for automatically discovering soft 404s. COMBATING Webmasters A number of basic rules can help webmasters to reduce link rot, including:
Authors citing URLs A number of studies have shown how wide-spread link rot is in academic literature (see below). Authors of scholarly publications should avoid citing "unstable" Internet references. There are several approaches authors may take to avoid introducing link rot into their work:
Tools There are a number of tools that can be used to combat link rot by archiving web resources:
IN ACADEMIC CITATIONS A number of studies have been performed showing the prevalence of link rot in academic literature: REFERENCES SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS |
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