Doc Searls makes a cogent argument that all web publishers should properly maintain their archives so that inbound links continue to work in perpetuity. He calls web writing without linking (or, presumably, with links that rot) literary bulimia. As Searls says, it is disrespectful to the links other writers have made to your material when your site undergoes an overhaul and you don’t retain the original directory structure. Searls also makes the point that link rot diminishes your authority as a source.
I plead guilty. I’ve broken all the links on our sites at least five times each. It was always a problem I was aware of, and never something I took lightly. It was unavoidable, but inexcusable. The migration from a static site to one where every page is generated dynamically, on the fly, from parts in a database almost always is paired with a new object structure, if not directory structure. Subsequently migrating to another publishing platform almost always brings yet another set of structures.
A few months ago I migrated our publishing platform from Zope to Frontier. Could I have hand-crafted the links so that the old Zope object IDs were used to reference pages in the Frontier database? Yes. Should I have done it? Maybe. Instead, I made the decision that over the long term, URLs like
. Could I have been wrong? Sure.
The web is inherently entropic. Like nature, it favors chaos over order. Links on the web, like tree roots in the forest, rot. It’s the natural order of things.
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