linkrot

link rot

The process by which Internet links on a website or search engine lead to a URL that is no longer available. A word of advice to any up-and-coming bloggers or Internet writers in general—don't litter your writing with links to external sources because link rot will inevitably set in.
See also: link, rot
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

linkrot

n. the gradual fading away of URL links in a web page. (The URLs are replaced by newer addresses or simply are deleted.) After a month or two, linkrot sets in and your links become deadends, one by one.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • link rot
  • throw (something) back in(to) (one's) face
  • buy low, sell high
  • a free bit of advice
  • advice
  • dubya-dubya-dubya
  • pro
  • pro tip
  • nothing is given so freely as advice
  • hit stores
References in periodicals archive
Linkrot is a serious problem, but a more troublesome problem exists in the form of content drift.
A 2013 article in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology by librarians Raizel Liebler and June Liebert found Supreme Court opinions to be afflicted by extensive linkrot. Footnotes, they argue, are the "cornerstone of judicial opinions, law review articles, and academic scholarship" and "provide both authorial verification of the original source material at the moment they are used and the needed information for readers to later find the cited source" ("Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: The Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010)"; digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1085&context=yjolt).
Linkrot combined with content drift equals reference rot.
Predating the Internet Archive activities, in 2013, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab released its own solution to the problem of linkrot, content drift, and reference rot: Perma.cc.
Linkrot + Content Drift = Reference Rot: The Unintended Consequences of Digitization
In the most recent of his recurring "State of the Web" sample analysis surveys, Terry Sullivan (http://www.pantos.org/atw/35654.html) reports that, at a 6% rate of dead links, the incidence of linkrot is pretty much unchanged.
As Web design guru Jakob Nielsen sees it (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html), "Even worse, linkrot contributes to dissolving the very fabric of the Web: there is a looming danger that the Web will stop being an interconnected universal hypertext and turn into a set of isolated info-islands.
Is linkrot equivalent to incorrect citations, as columnist Ernest Perez speculates in his TECHTOOLS column?
Using Link Checkers