You visited a webpage a couple of years ago and it worked just fine. You visit the same webpage today but you get the “Error 404” message — why is that? The answer is link rot. Over time, a webpage’s cited links may rot and eventually become inaccessible. Hence, every visitor that tries to visit the webpage gets an error message. But why does that even happen? Why does linkrot occur? How do you fix it? Well, that’s what we’re going to discuss today. Read through to find out everything you need to know about linkrot. Plus, we also discuss URL Freezer — the single best solution to deal with linkrot permanently. Let’s dive in.
There are a couple of reasons for the occurrence of linkrot. Publishers update their sites to introduce new features and implement fixes. When they do so, the associated web pages may become broken links. When a publisher has updated its site several times in a row, the link may get completely destroyed and inaccessible. Furthermore, when new web pages are created and published on the internet, older ones get pushed down. When a lot of new pages have been created and uploaded, the older ones may become completely inaccessible.
Depending on the cause of link rot, it can be classified into two types.
This type of linkrot happens when the publisher updates the webpage. As mentioned in the previous section, links may get broken and become inaccessible due to several webpage updates in a row. When that happens, the link rot is called to happen due to natural disappearance.
Older web pages are less likely to be useful to a web surfer. That’s why search engines prefer placing newer web pages on top of the search results. When this happens, older web pages may eventually become obsolete due to newer competitor pages being published regularly.
Until now, there has been no automated solution to prevent link rotting. You see, link rotting is a natural phenomenon and happens to every webpage, despite its popularity and size. There’s no webpage safe from it. Most people use a manual tool to fix expired links. However, this process isn’t automatic and requires human effort now and then. There’s another solution to deal with link rot, and it’s called creating permanent links, also known as permalinks. A permalink is created to have a constant link webpage that doesn't change for several years in the future. However, the content of permalinks may change not guaranteeing the consistency. The best solution would be a tool that automatically detects broken links and presents the user with an alternative webpage with the same content. Enters URL Freezer — a tool that does exactly that!
URL Freezer is a tool that prevents your webpage visitors from seeing the “Error 404” message. Whenever any of your web pages go out of service, URL Freezer can automatically detect it. Upon detection, URL Freezer instantly replaces the webpage with a live snapshot of the expired webpage. When this happens, all your website visitors see a web page that looks exactly like the real webpage. It drastically improves the user experience as people can still see and interact with the content they came looking for. The best part is, URL Freezer is automatic. Typical fixes of broken URLs need to be used every time a webpage rots. That’s not the case with URL Freezer. You only need to implement it into your site once, and every rotten webpage will be instantly replaced with a live snapshot when it goes down.
Link rotting is a common internet problem that breaks web pages over time. However, URL Freezer is your top solution to deal with it and retain your webpage visitors nonetheless.