Using the same blogging software for 20 years
&gt; I gave up on dealing with link rot years ago. If I come across an old post with non-functioning links, I may just find a new resource, link to The Wayback Machine or (if I&#x27;m getting some spammer trying to get me to fix a broken link by linking to their black-hat-SEO laiden spamfarm) removing the link outright. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s worth the time to fix old links, given the average lifespan of a website is 2½ years and trying to automate the detection of link rot is a fools errand (a page that goes 404 or does not respond is easy—now handle the case where it&#x27;s a new company running the site and all old links still go a page, but not the page that you linked to). I&#x27;m also beginning to think it&#x27;s not worth linking at all, but old habits die hard.<p>After about nine years of writing, I&#x27;ve concluded something similar: my existing reactive approach (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Archiving-URLs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Archiving-URLs</a>) is not going to scale either with expanding content or over time. Fixing individual links is OK if you have only a few or aren&#x27;t going to be around too long, but as you approach tens of thousands of links over decades, the dead links build up.<p>So the solution I am going to implement soon is taking a tool like ArchiveBox or SinglePage and <i>hosting my own copies</i> of (most) external links, so they will be cached shortly after linking and can&#x27;t break. The bandwidth and space will be somewhat expensive, but it&#x27;ll save me and my readers a ton in the long run.