Do you remember when the web was young and everything was about having a “Home Page”? The legacy is still there in our web browser’s “Home” button (and do you wonder why we are limited to one home?). In fact, when I started our web server in 1993, like others, I made our primary web entrance a file named… homePage.html

In fact, in those days (late 1993), the correct URL to get to the MCLI main entrance was:
http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/homePage.html

Using a few little tricks of web “redirection”, this 11 year old URL actually still works and gets you to the current main entrance at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/. Is it magic? Not at all, and it is easier than you think. The biggest mystery is why so many sites, big and small, are willing to leave old links hanging in the breeze.

I will show later how I have been able to 3 times migrate a 70+ Mb web directory to different servers yet never produce a bad link message for that pile of content.

But I am not writing to be nostalgic about the web of the early 1990s (remember those ugly grey pages? Title tag animations? The Green Netscape logo?). Let’s take a look at scenarios that might happen among the people who create web content:

“We’ve improved our site to use interactive scripting so all web file pages will be changed from *.html to *.asp”

“That is an effective data analysis web site you built in your personal directory, Smithers, but since it gets so much traffic, we want to provide it a shorter URL by moving it to a top level on our main web site.”

“Most of the web content will be re-organized from a directory structure based on department names to ones based on services provided.”

“That is sol old, let’s just delete it from the web server”

What do these have in common? Let’s talk about Linkrot…