TECH Signal 505
Crawl of 657,607 pre-2015 links finds 76.7% no longer load
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Illustration only Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash
A study of 657,607 links from a 2009-2014 URL shortener found that 76.7% of crawlable destinations no longer load, with smaller sites faring worse than major platforms.
Link rot is a measurable, widespread problem: most pre-2015 URLs are dead. Engineers building on old references or archival systems need to account for this decay. The study also shows that centralized platforms are more durable than the small web.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
76.7% of 655,178 safe, crawlable link records from the 0.mk database no longer returned a loading page.
At the unique-URL level, 78.7% of 492,620 crawlable destinations did not load.
The data is from a Macedonian URL shortener, so it is not a global census but a large sample of one community's shared links.
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