38% of webpages that were available in 2013 are no longer available!

[Mac]

Digital decay, they call it

I just came across this statistic, here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2 ... isappears/
Pages that return a 404 error - page not found.

Links are fairing worse, up to 53% of Wikipedia pages contain one or more dead links in their reference sections, with 11% of all reference links broken.

I always figured this as being an issue, and have had a policy from day one that all references are copied down and archived, even if it is just a screen shot. Always assume that the web page you are looking at could be gone the following day.

This is an issue with numismatic related websites also, though some older auction websites do maintain their archives.
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=476&p=4199#p4199
An issue seems to be when a website is modernised or upgraded all of the older pages are simply dumped, or renamed with no redirect script being added to provide a bridge to the page from the old url address.
We do try to keep links updated on this website!

Here is another study which reveals a similar picture:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-rot-study/