Law firms and other businesses put significant effort into their marketing materials, including blog posts, webpages, and presentations, as they seek to demonstrate their expertise, authority, and client focus. But, so often, informative content is lost due to link rot, those broken hyperlinks caused by webpages that are no longer available, resulting in a 404 “page not found” error, for example. At best, link rot is an annoyance. At its worst, it can limit permanent public access to information and impair access to justice. There are steps that we can take to reduce these barriers that affect our readers and to create something like permanence for our web content.

First, let’s address some of the reasons for link rot. Although dead links are often caused by other parties, our own institutional practices can create broken links. We can point to plenty of causes including:

• Website redesign, unmaintained sites, reconfigured sites and pages, and changes in servers or domain names;
• Linking to external content over which we have limited control, especially news sites and other ephemeral material that can change quickly, that might not be aligned with an archiving policy or practices, or that might intentionally not be maintained for the long haul;
• Link shortening tools that have been discontinued, like goo.gl, or shortened URLs that expire;
• Links that, while not dead, go to password-protected, proprietary, or members-only pages, thus, denying access unintentionally to some readers;
• Sloppy research and writing without verification of links in the first place; and,
• Page takedowns due to organizational mission or policy changes or court orders.

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There are other reasons, certainly, for link rot but that’s a start. Let’s now look at what organizations and businesses can do to combat link rot on their own sites. Here are a few best practices for your consideration:

• Employ linking practices with your readers’ experience in mind. Link only to sites in which you have a high degree of confidence in their stability and longevity and which are publicly accessible without creating accounts or paying a fee;
• When your firm goes through a platform or site redesign, give attention to file locations, ensuring that documents and pages aren’t lost in the transition and using 301 redirection to get to new pages;
• Use readily available tools and plug-ins or link-checking features in your firm’s CMS to identify dead links on your own website on a routine basis and replace them;
• Use permalinks (persistent or permanent links) in your firm’s web and social media presence. We’re familiar with ISBNs for identifying specific editions of books; permalinks are that sort of persistent identifier. I think highly of Perma.cc which is available for for-profits by subscription. Other permalink-creating functionality is built into some CMS and other website publishing applications. If you use WordPress or Drupal, a plug-in called Amber will archive links.

I could go on about the serious societal and legal implications of link rot but I’ve focused on practical matters here and the steps we can take at the individual and organizational level to address the issue.