Fourteen years ago, I published a daily blog that was part laddie magazine and part viral-video curation site. It was nothing to be proud of and I rightfully abandoned it. In fact, I hadn't thought about it until recently when I stumbled across something interesting: The blog still exists.
Even though I let the domain registration lapse, the site itself was hosted on a Blogspot subdomain and Google has been pretty good about keeping Blogger's content online.
Nevertheless, only 18% of the external hyperlinks still resolve to what they were intended to. Here is a breakdown of the link rot:
Status of Broken Links
The plurality of the inaccessible content is the result of simple broken links, however, a third of the missing content was attributable to copyright claims (mostly on YouTube.)
It's silly to use a Web 2.0 blog as a proxy for the entire web, but if I humor the idea, this data implies an 11.5% link decay rate per year. Even a 1% decay rate would sever billions of links annually!
Notwithstanding these digital dead ends, I was able to find most of the missing content without much digging. For viral videos, the Internet really is forever. (Sadly, the same is true for revenge porn and other forms of cyberbullying that are just as harmful.)
Unfortunately, it has become significantly harder to find factual news articles and other historically significant content from a decade ago, no thanks to Google nor the SEOs who chase its algorithm.
Commercialism and greed are poisoning the web and may ultimately kill it. But, if you're interested in keeping the historical web alive for another day, check out the non-profit Internet Archive.