The Art of Linking
Since January of 2006 when I started blogging, I have written more than 2000 articles, attached more than 5100 images, and linked to more than 6000 news articles and blog posts.
But writing the articles, inserting the photos, and linking to others is not the hard part. What takes up much more of my time is making sure the links stay up-to-date.
A few dead links show up somewhere among my blog archives every single week. To root these out I have engaged the services of a part-time person. I also get some help from my readers who email me that a particular link now points to a spam site that took the domain name abandoned by the original blogger. In some instances the article URL disappears because the blogger changed blogging platforms and somehow lost some of the archived posts.
I am loath to send my readers to addresses that return a "Sorry, the page you requested was not found" or "The News Article you requested is no longer available."
Instead, I try to find a substitute news organization or blog to replace the dead one. For example, if the link was to a news article that is no longer available, I search using an appropriate phrase or set of keywords to find a news site that covers the same item I was originally linking to. But I have grown wiser over the years: I now know which news organizations NOT to link to. Reuters and BBC, for the most part, leave intact the original URLs to their stories, while the New York Times, the New York Post, and the Jerusalem Post archive their articles after a few weeks. Because of this I do not link to these idiots. I will attribute the excerpt to them, but I do not bother to leave a clickable link. Why bother if my reader will find nothing of interest at the other end of the click?
If the blogger closed his blog or lost his archive, I try to retrieve the archived copy of the article from the Wayback Machine and substitute that link for the rotted one. For example, in my article Tea with a Stranger I linked to 2 posts by the now defunct blog Western Resistance. Sadly, the original links go to a parking spot which advises me that "This domain may be for sale."
Luckily, I found stored copies of the articles in the Wayback Machine and replaced the links in my post so that my readers will not be frustrated with dead ends. I never want my readers to ever find that they are wasting their time clicking on links in my articles. How often have you come upon an article that says: "Wow you got see this." And when you click on the link - you end up in some Internet bit-bucket with messages such as "Photo not found," or "Views have exceeded limit - buy more bandwidth," or "Forbidden - you do not have permission to access this image," or any of hundreds of other ways of saying that you are screwed.
When I link to a photo, I keep a copy on my server so that if that image ever rots, or the server which it resides on dies, or if the poster removes the image, I can insert my copy in its place. You should never see a message on my blog that says, "This image no longer available."
If the blog post is no longer archived anywhere on the Internet I make a notation: [defunct blog] to explain to my readers why there is no link to a particular excerpt.
With the exception of links to my own articles, I rarely point to a link without giving my reader enough of an excerpt or footnote [see footnote (1)] so that if the site returns a 404 error, my reader will still be able to read something from the pointed-to site.
Some of the programs I use to help me find redirects and bad links are W3C Link Checker, Xenu's Link Sleuth, and Google's Link Graph widget if the blogger made it available on his 404 page.
My own "404 Not Found Page" uses the Link Graph widget to help visitors find the correct article. Sometimes on forums an URL will get shortened by the forum software or be incorrectly copied and pasted by a user. For example, I have seen an URL like http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/09/muslim-humor-muslim-jokes.html get shortened to http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2006/09/muslim-humor-muslim-jok.... - but that's OK because Google will suggest the correct URL despite such typos. Go ahead, click on the link and see how it works.
Hopefully, by carefully maintaining links and images, my articles will remain fresh, relevant and useful to my readers and hopefully search engines will continue to point to my articles and not penalize me for having too many dead links.
In case you are wondering, my readers click on never less than a thousand links and images every single day.
ENDNOTES
(1):
Wiki, Link rot
The 404 "not found" response is familiar to even the occasional Web user. A number of studies have examined the prevalence of link rot on the Web, in academic literature, and in digital libraries. In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. (2003) discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the internet. McCown et al. (2005) discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication, and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
