{"id":141365,"date":"2022-04-29T01:40:30","date_gmt":"2022-04-29T06:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/?p=141365"},"modified":"2024-02-02T12:07:46","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T17:07:46","slug":"link-rot-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/link-rot-study\/","title":{"rendered":"At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead (Ahrefs Study on Link Rot)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Link rot is when links stop pointing to their intended file, web page, or server. The links are dead. Link rot happens as pages on the internet are removed, redirected, or updated causing the links on these pages to go to broken pages or pages whose content has been altered.<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Since January 2013, 66.5% of the links pointing to the 2,062,173 websites we sampled have rotted. We found another 6.45% with temporary errors. We don\u2019t know if they\u2019re still there or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is even more complicated when it comes to SEO. Another 1.55% have other issues that prevent the links from being counted for the purposes of ranking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That means a total of 74.5% of the links in our study are considered lost, with at least 66.5% being rotted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often, the links that no longer work are important. Check out this example<\/a> of a website that was referenced in a U.S. Supreme Court case. Someone bought the domain and used it to make a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

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\"Image<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In a previous study<\/a> of legal journals and citations from 2014, 70% of the links within the journals and 50% of the URLs from U.S. Supreme Court decisions did not contain the originally cited material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another study<\/a> from 2012 found that 30% of social media links were dead within two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the previous studies are fairly small and contain older parts of the web. I assume a lot more of the older web is already gone, if not most of it. For example, most sites stopped using extensions like .html on URLs many years ago in favor of clean URLs. Most sites have also moved from HTTP to HTTPs<\/a>.

Considering the above, we decided to do the largest link rot study ever. And it\u2019s one of the only ones that cover the more recent version of the web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s dig into the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ahrefs has been crawling the web since 2010. But for the purpose of this study, we\u2019re only looking at the data from January 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can use the Backlinks<\/strong> report in Ahrefs\u2019 Site Explorer<\/a> to check the data for your own site. For Ahrefs, 26.9 million out of 174.3 million links have been lost. Just compare the numbers with the \u201cLost\u201d filter applied vs. the numbers with the \u201cAll\u201d filter applied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

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\"Gif<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There are a few cases we tag as lost that we don\u2019t count as link rot. I\u2019ll cover that below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I mentioned in the intro, at least 66.5% of links to the sampled websites have rotted in the last nine years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The web is complex and messy, and some things change faster than others. I wanted to see how many sites have link rot\u2014and what percentage of their links experience link rot. A huge thanks to our data scientist Loveme Felicilda for pulling this data! This is the distribution for the percentage of link rot by domain across the dataset.<\/p>\n

\"Histogram<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

There are a lot of small sites that don\u2019t have much link rot. If we take out the smallest sites and only look at those with more than 10 live links, you\u2019ll see that larger sites seem to have quite a bit of link rot.<\/p>\n

\"Histogram<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

As I mentioned in the intro, the number of links we consider lost when it comes to SEO is even higher\u2014percentage-wise, it\u2019s 74.5%. I also wanted to see the distribution for these across the dataset.<\/p>\n

\"Histogram<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

There are a lot of small sites that don\u2019t have many lost links. If we take out the smallest sites and only look at those with more than 10 live links, you\u2019ll see that larger sites seem to have lost quite a lot of their links.<\/p>\n

\"Histogram<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Links can be lost for many reasons. We classify lost links in different ways at Ahrefs. Here are the most common reasons that links are lost:<\/p>\n\n\n\n