Link rot: why backlinks decay and how to catch it

Link rot is the slow loss of working links as the web changes. Pages get deleted, moved or rewritten, and the links on them break or vanish. For anyone building backlinks, it means a link you earned this year can quietly stop existing next year.

How common link rot is

In a study published in 2024, Pew Research Center measured it. It found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. Across pages that existed at any point between 2013 and 2023, about a quarter were gone. Pew also found that 23% of news pages and 21% of government pages contained at least one broken link.

Those figures describe the whole web, and backlinks live on the same pages. They are a fair warning: a link is only as durable as the page that carries it.

Two ways link rot hits your backlinks

Link rot affects you from both ends of a link.

The page that links to you changes. The publisher deletes the article, moves it to a new address or rewrites it without your link. Your backlink is gone even though you did nothing. A rewrite that drops your link is a lost backlink; a deleted page is a source that no longer exists.

Your own page changes. You rename a URL or retire a page, and every link pointing at the old address now leads to an error. The link still exists, but it points nowhere useful. That is a broken backlink, and it is the half of link rot you control.

Prevent the half you control

When you move a page, redirect the old address to the new one. Google recommends a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible. That keeps every existing backlink working and tells search engines where the page went.

Before you retire a page, check which earned links point at it. If a link points there, redirect the address to the closest replacement or ask the publisher to update the link. Do not leave it returning an error.

Catch the half you don't control

You can't stop a publisher from editing their page. You can notice it quickly, while the change is recent and the editor still remembers it. That takes repeated checks of the exact pages that link to you:

1. Record each earned link with its source page and the page it should point to.
2. Check the source pages on a schedule. Daily works for links you care about.
3. Keep checks that could not read the page apart from checks that found no link. A blocked check is unknown, not rot.
4. Confirm a loss with a second full check before you act on it.
5. Check your own linked pages separately, so you see when your side breaks.

AgentLinkOps runs this loop for the links you add: it checks each earned link daily by default, marks a link lost only after two complete absent checks at least 30 minutes apart, and can check your own destination pages as a separate observation. The backlink monitoring checklist covers the same steps for any tool.

When rot has already happened

For a link lost to an edit or a moved page, read the evidence first, then decide whether a request is worth sending. The link reclamation checklist walks through the request. For a link broken by your own move, add the redirect. That fix needs no one's permission: the link works for visitors again at once, and search engines pick up the change when they next crawl it.

Sources

1. When Online Content Disappears · Pew Research Center · 2024-05-17
2. Redirects and Google Search · Google Search Central · 2026-04-14