linkrot

[James Harbeck]

The government of Canada is enforcing some new policies with its
websites, one consequence of which is an announcement I recently
received that they will be redoing the Health Canada site and all the
URLs will be changing. This will make several hundred thousand (by
Google) existing links to hc-sc.gc.ca pages invalid, since they're
only keeping their redirects up for a short time. In the context of a
discussion of this, I encountered a term which I am surprised not to
recall encountering before: linkrot. The one-word version gets 26,000
hits; the two-word version (link rot) gets 461,000 hits. A real
winner of a term, I'd say -- I'm sure to use it with a certain
frequency. I wonder whether the increasing tendency to close up
compounds over time will evidence itself in this case too.

James Harbeck.

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