I work for a publisher that produces several articles a day that include external links for reference. More and more I seem to be coming across cases where those links are now broken. In the near future, I will startup an automated script that checks for broken links (and I'm guessing I may have to get it warning on redirects since certain bad actors use redirects when they should be using 410).
When I have some decent results, I'll be ensuring the editorial team is aware of which sites in particular are prone to breaking links, and which they can trust. The net effect will be that we will be less likely to drive traffic to certain domains. Whether enough other people will do this to make any kind of meaningful difference is unknown, but it's certainly better to be a trustworthy site that it can't hurt to link to.
On a related note, I learnt this week that taken-down YouTube videos are a PITA. Not only do they give a 200 when requested, they also give zero results when looked-up via the youtube api. Sure, they can still be treated as a 'broken link' from our end, but it would be nice to be able to differentiate between a video that was taken down and one that may never have existed in the first place.
There's always the Internet Archive Wayback Machine "save page now" feature. Wikipedia's been pretty enthusiastic about using it to make sure that external links remain available -- and that the cited version is available.
What I want to do is make an extension that sends a request to web.archive.org/save/{URL} whenever you visit a webpage. To prevent flooding, I would make it only send a request for a specific URL once a month.
When I have some decent results, I'll be ensuring the editorial team is aware of which sites in particular are prone to breaking links, and which they can trust. The net effect will be that we will be less likely to drive traffic to certain domains. Whether enough other people will do this to make any kind of meaningful difference is unknown, but it's certainly better to be a trustworthy site that it can't hurt to link to.
On a related note, I learnt this week that taken-down YouTube videos are a PITA. Not only do they give a 200 when requested, they also give zero results when looked-up via the youtube api. Sure, they can still be treated as a 'broken link' from our end, but it would be nice to be able to differentiate between a video that was taken down and one that may never have existed in the first place.