I looked at the earliest archived copy I could find, and noticed down in the corner a badge for a long-forgotten website contest. Every quarter, the UCI Bookstore holds a literary contest, sometimes poetry, sometimes short stories. In spring 1996, they decided to make it a website contest. I had just built a website for the club, and submitted it. Our site was one of the three winners [archive.org].*

Just for kicks, I decided to see which of the sites were still around.

• Literary Guild at UCI – gone. The club disbanded after the 2000 school year, and the defunct website was removed 2 years later. I still keep an archive of one segment, the collaborative writing projects, but it used to have 10 times as much writing, meeting minutes, club info and news, etc.
• The Orchid Weblopedia – gone. It appears to have moved around a bit for several years, but the top search result for the title brings up its last web designer, and a note saying that “this page no longer exists.”
• Ishmael’s Companion – the study guide for the book, Ishmael is still around, but it’s now a tiny part of author Daniel Quinn’s site.

1 out of 3. And even that one’s at a different location.

And so the link rot continues…

* I was hoping to link to an independent announcement, but the UCI Bookstore website only lists the most recent winners (Spring 2007), and while the Anteater Weekly regularly announced the winners, their archives only go back to 1997. I did find the announcement in the May 30, 1996 Zotmail Archive, but it doesn’t return linkable results, so you’ll have to search for it.

Strangely enough, this week 3 links on “What the heck is a Hyperborea?” have dropped off the face of the net. I checked the rest of the links manually, and 2 more turned up broken sites with internal errors!

The first was easy. It’s an excerpt from the book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez. I just pulled up the Archive.org copy, picked a sentence to search for… and found the same excerpt at another URL. (A classic college website issue: moving faculty pages from a specific server to a more general site.)

The other two that actually reported errors are both role-playing games. The MUD Darkwind has moved to its own domain. Epiphany: The Legends of Hyperborea is a little trickier. It’s missing from its publisher’s website, but there are references to it online. I figured I could link to the sourcebook at Amazon, or maybe to a review, but the most informative page I could find was on archive.org.

Now to the sites that lied and reported “200 OK” instead of an error code. One was a page describing Clark Ashton Smith’s book, Hyperborea. The site had a search box on the home page, making it easy to find the new location. (It would have been nice if they’d actually removed the old script instead of letting it break. A 404 or even a 500 would have helped me catch this earlier.)

That leaves a Conan reference site, which is shut down, the domain name listed for sale. I went looking and found a site with maps of the world in which Conan takes place, showing Hyperborea near Cimmeria.

It’s just odd that three links would vanish from the same page at more or less the same time.

Web Sites that Heal considers some of the causes of linkrot, including: changing CMS systems (which I’ve dealt with here twice), poor structure (starting small and simple, but finding that as the site grows, the old design doesn’t work anymore), lack of testing, and plain apathy. More interesting are some of the reasons it becomes a problem, in particular the difficulty in setting up redirections and informing other sites that you’ve moved. That’s something else I can relate to: My site hasn’t been on the UCI Arts server in four years, yet despite a massive attempt to get people to update their links, Altavista still shows 82 pages linking to my site’s old location. Something I think the article leaves out is the number of sites – particularly people who set up a free Geocities account back in the dot-com era – that just aren’t maintained anymore. The pages are there, but they’re six years out of date – and so are the links.

The article then proceeds to suggest an automated server-to-server system that will detect incoming links to a moved page, then contact the referring site, report the new location, and instruct it to update the link with no human intervention whatsoever. A great idea, though it will require people like me to drop the edit-locally-and-upload model of development.

“Web Sites That Heal” referred to a Jakob Nielsen column on Linkrot. Nielsen’s advice is frequently useful, though not always applicable. Sadly, his recent columns have tended toward rehashing old ones or applying to ever more specialized niches, but sometimes his advice is spot-on. In this case, the article from six years ago still applies to today’s web: run a link validator on your site from time to time, and keep old URLs on your own site active (whether with actual content or with a redirect). The comments on this article are worth reading as well.

Lastly, I found a remark on Consequences of Linkrot as applied to weblogs. Most of the post is actually an excerpt from Idle Words [archive.org], where the original author notes that the classic blog post – a single line linking to something of interest, or a series of the same – is particularly susceptible to linkrot. Without the original material, there’s nothing (or next to nothing) left. And it happens fast: The Web isn’t that old, and blogging is even younger, yet information is disappearing rapidly enough that you really have to wonder how much of what exists today will still be around – in any form – ten years from now. One of the key lessons DeLong takes from this article: it’s “critically important not just to link but to quote–and to quote extensively.”

The lesson is clear: The site you link to today may not be there tomorrow, and you may not have the time (or inclination) to go chasing it down. Quote it, summarize it, add context, write lots of commentary, whatever. Make sure what you post can stand on its own… just in case it has to.