Link Rotting on the Blog »
I hate it when people change their links and don't provide any way to get from the old one to the new one. It's even worse when organizations do it. And the absolute worst culprit of all is the government. They have all sorts of data, and loads of it is at least marginally interesting to someone. Take the Mecklenburg Board of Elections. I had a number of links to past results and informational pages, and they all just died. Actually, they may have been dead for a while. But I just noticed it.
I understand some elections are two years old. So what? Keep 'em out there. That way people can look them up later. Informational pages shouldn't change that much - provide redirects to the new locations, or at the very least to the home page. Come on people.
Update: Have this problem? Try the free Alexa Amazon Associate Site Report. It's limited to 50 broken links per report, and 1 report per day, but hopefully it won't take you long to get through it. I had to run three days straight at first, now I barely break double-digits, and that's mostly when someone removes their archives. Cut it out!
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