Coping with Link Rot

First of all, don't be part of the problem

• If you create a web page or ask your students to create a course web page, ensure that this link remains live after the term has ended.
• If your institution reorganizes it site, work with IT staff to ensure that users get a redirect to the new location of your pages rather than a rotten link with a 404 file not found error message.
• Check the links on your pages frequently - there are tools to help you do this (try a search with [tools prevent "link rot"] to find them).
• If possible obtain permission to post material at your site as a hedge against future link rot.

To read more about link rot see:

• Link Rot in your Family Tree? - A Case Study in the Dynamics of Internet Genealogy
• Broken Links: Just How Rapidly Do Science Education Hyperlinks Go Extinct?

Here are a few things to try when you find a rotten link:

URL truncation

• Delete portions of the URL starting at the right. Delete the information up to a /
• For example, if this link to a set of technology teaching tips was broken: http://www.admin.youruni.edu/ctl/techteachtips.html
• You might start by deleting the document portion of the URL leaving you with: http://www.admin.youruni.edu/ctl/
• If this brought you to a live page then you might search that page for a link to technology teaching tips. If this failed you could try reducing the URL to the host site and searching that for tech teaching tips: http://www.admin.youruni.edu/
• If this failed you might try reducing the host site further and then retrying your search: http://www.youruni.edu/

If you find a live page you can search for the information you seek

1. by looking it over
2. by using a search tool if one is provided, or
3. by using a search engine like Google with an advanced feature that allows you to restrict your search to a specific domain.

In Google the advanced operator to use is site: and to look for this set of tips you could use the terms ["technology teaching tips" site:.youruni.edu]. This feature can also be accessed through Google's advanced search page or the advanced search pages of most search engines - the feature to specify is domain. Finally, if, as in this example, the page you are searching for is on the web site of a higher education institution, you may be able use Google University Search to search the institution's site.

Search using the words in the rotten link's anchor, including all words and putting them inside quotation marks

For example, if the rotten link's anchor was labeled Psychology Teachers... unplugged!, you would enter ["psychology teachers unplugged"] into your favorite search engine. The quote marks are the key - with them most search engines, web directories, and metasearch engines will return pages with this exact phrase, including other pages that have links with the same label (and you just may find that one of these is not rotten). This feature is also available on Google and most other search engines' advanced search pages. Typically you get a choice of restricting the search to pages:

• with all of the words in your query (the default)
• with the exact phrase (equivalent to the quote marks)
• with at least one of the words in your query (equivalent to OR)
• without specific words in your query (equivalent to NOT or -)

With many search tools you can also restrict the search to the page title or the URL - this feature is also found on advanced search pages. For example, in Google the advanced operator allintitle: will return results in which the search term appears in the page title, allinurl: will return pages in which the search term appears in the URL, and allinanchor: returns pages where the terms appear in the anchor text for a link.

Search using the name of the organization or institution responsible for creating/sponsoring the material you are seeking

You can find names by inspecting your original page with the broken link, other pages you found when searching using the broken link's label, text content, or the URL.
For example, if the link to a set of photos of Texas in spring was broken, but the page mentioned that these photos were held at the Tiny Texas Museum of Western Art, you might do a search on that institution. If you found a Tiny Texas Museum of Western Art site, you might then search it for your photos, again, either by looking it over, by using a search tool if one is provided or by restricting your search to its domain in your favorite search engine.

Search using the name of the individual(s) responsible for creating/sponsoring the material you are seeking

For example, the rotten link's URL may include a name (in some cases names are preceded by a tilde ~). If you know the person's institution or organization you might search for her/his name on the institutional/organizational site. This might give you the person's personal page which might have a link to the material you are looking for, or it might give you the person's email in which case you could send them a message asking about the material that you are seeking. If you have only a person's name and not an affiliation you might try Yahoo People Search http://search.yahoo.com/people/. This may provide you with an email address or white pages address.

Examine the content in a cached version

For example, if you find a rotten link in a search on ["cooperative learning" calculus] and the word Cached appears to the right of the URL you can click on it and the cached version of the document will be loaded. This is also useful if a site is not loading and you know the link is not broken or when you are are working on a machine that does not support .pdf, .ppt, etc. formats). In Google this type of search can also be done with the advanced operator cache: for example: [cache:www.little10.edu/math/coop_for_calculus.html].

Check for an archived version with the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is an internet archive with approximately 10 billion pages from 1996 to the a few months ago. You paste in the URL and if the page has been archived it will return the version(s) with the date(s) on which it was archived. You can also do a keyword search of the archive. In addition to being the home of the Wayback Machine, archive.org also boasts a moving image archive, an audio archive, and a text archive (Million Book Project, Children's Library, Project Gutenberg).

Finally, check out ghostsites

Slogan "the dead roam here," just in case the whole domain is really rotten.