Link Rot

A measure of how many and what percent of a website's links are broken. Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are: a website going offline linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons) moving a page's location changing a domain's content management system Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant. See also: Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.