The ZOMDir project: The half-life of a link is two year success fail Sep OCT Nov 17 2016 2017 2018 62 captures 16 Oct 2017 - 15 Apr 2021 About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Internet Archive These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved. Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors. The goal is to fix all broken links on the web. Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. Collection: Wikipedia Near Real Time (from IRC) This is a collection of web page captures from links added to, or changed on, Wikipedia pages. The idea is to bring a reliability to Wikipedia outlinks so that if the pages referenced by Wikipedia articles are changed, or go away, a reader can permanently find what was originally referred to. This is part of the Internet Archive's attempt to rid the web of broken links. TIMESTAMPS The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20171017041901/http://blog.zomdir.com/2017/10/the-half-life-of-link-is-two-year.html ZOMDir > Blog Thursday, 12 October 2017 The half-life of a link is two year The half-life of a link is two year. Better said, the half-life of an external link is two year.  That is, when you create today a website with 100 working external links and checks your website after two year with a broken link checker, you will discover that rougly 50 links are broken. How do you know? I can almost hear you thinking "How do you know?". Well I will explain below. In the past I have copied as much data as possible of the directory Yahoo! This is because Yahoo! stopped, I have created a directory myself and I wanted to analyse the links and structure of this famous directory. At January 4, 2016 I analysed the data I have and concluded that 77% (or more exactly 76.8387682%) of the links are fine. Recently (October, 9 2017) I analysed the data again. Now 42% (42.0219319%) of the links are fine. Based on this data I concluded that on an average day 0,093670021% of external links will get broken. That does not seem much. However the linkrot percentage per month is 2.81%.  Consequences After a half year one sixth of the links are broken. After a year 30% of the links are broken. After two years 50% of the links are broken. Hence the half-life of a link is two year. See also this graph below So when you think 3% broken links is acceptable, then you should check for broken links every month. When 5% is acceptable, check every two months and when you think 10% is acceptable, check every 4 months for broken links. Be wise, and check and repair your links at a regular base, Hans Update: After writing this blogpost  I discovered that in the document "A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence" it is stated that the half-time of a random web page is about 2.0 years. Great that's exactly what I concluded.   -- ZOMDir.com is a dynamic directory and a wiki Everyone is able to add a link in 10 seconds To learn more view this Slideshare presentation Posted by Hans van der Graaf at 12:26 Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest No comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Popular Posts An alternative for Readability Why are these bots visiting ZOMDir.com? Minimal design Bookmarklets with icons? Pagerank checkers Blog Archive ▼  2017 (7) ▼  October (3) Dead Link City - A comparison of 8 Free Online Lin... The half-life of a link is two year How DeadLinkCity improved "Broken Links at a Glanc... ►  September (3) ►  June (1) ►  2016 (5) ►  December (1) ►  March (1) ►  February (2) ►  January (1) ►  2015 (4) ►  June (1) ►  May (1) ►  March (1) ►  January (1) ►  2014 (16) ►  December (2) ►  November (2) ►  October (2) ►  June (2) ►  February (3) ►  January (5) ►  2013 (11) ►  December (1) ►  November (2) ►  October (1) ►  September (5) ►  August (1) ►  July (1) ►  2012 (1) ►  February (1) ►  2011 (22) ►  December (1) ►  October (2) ►  September (1) ►  June (1) ►  May (1) ►  April (7) ►  February (2) ►  January (7) ►  2010 (1) ►  December (1) Total Pageviews About Me Hans van der Graaf View my complete profile (c) Hans van der Graaf. Powered by Blogger.