The average lifespan of a webpage is about 77 days. It matters not whether the site is still running or dead. Webmasters shuffle stuff about and delete things at will. Click on the random article button and see a) how many of the first 10 have external links, and b) how many of those links are still live, or don't redirect to the sites homepage. I reckon at least 50% of all external links on en.wp are dead. Lesson: the internet is ephemeral and the only permanent record is on physical material.
On 30/06/2015 05:36, Jonatan Svensson Glad wrote:
The website findarticles died in 2012 causing over 20 000 articles to have dead links on them. A few of them was backed up on Wayback, but their robot.txt changed so all those archives were deleted as well. So either articles have a dead link showing as 200 (which findlinks.com does) or they are claiming to be archived while they are not. Read more in my blog post about this: https://jonatanglad.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/findarticles-com/ Can we use a bot to remove all instances of this link, or should we go through them all manually? Can we use bots such as CItation bot (which is currently blocked) to find doi's and other links to replace these links with? Ideas people! Barely any of these links are tagged as dead, and can't by Checklinks (unless done manually) since they show as 200. /Josve05a