Until I started blogging in earnest I didn’t give much thought to who I linked to. If you’re sending someone an IM or email saying “check this out”, you don’t worry much about link rot.
If you’re writing a blog post, the more you trust the link to stay alive and stay “classy” the more likely you are to link to it. As a web professional this is something I intellectually knew but never took to heart until I was writing a post and had to make a decision between a link to Nintendo’s BrainAge page and Wikipedia’s BrainAge page.
Even though anyone can edit, deface, and presumably destroy the Wikipedia page, I ended up linking to it instead of the Nintendo page because:
- The Nintendo page had a user hostile URL. Wikipedia’s human readable URLs just feel more likely to stay alive. If your URLs look like they were randomly generated by computers, you’re subtly signaling that when your site technology inevitably changes all your old links will die.
- I trust Wikipedia never to run obnoxious animated ads, spyware, or anything else that I would be embarrassed about linking to.
- Unlike almost any other site I might link to, I expect Wikipedia pages to not only stay alive but to get better over time.
- I trust Wikipedia to never to hide content that was previously available behind a “pay wall”.
Nintendo runs a fine site, and this post isn’t really about Nintendo. It’s about the the fact that, all other things being equal, I tend to link to sites that adhere to the “vectors of trust” I’ve mentioned.
One Comment
Hi,
I think your idea of linking to wikipedia is very smart. But it doesn’t always have what I need.
I got tired of broken links on my websites. And I got tired of finding link rot everywhere on the web. So I created a free website for archiving links. This service is designed to prevent link-rot. In other words you will be able to create permanent links to other websites that will not change or go away once you create them.
http://www.stayboystay.com
I hope that gives you another alternative.
Lars