Dead Links Are Costing You Money: How to Prevent Broken Links

What link rot is — and how common it is

Link rot is the quiet failure of the internet: over time, pages disappear, domains expire, and servers get decommissioned. Studies of web archives have found that roughly one in five links breaks within a few years. For marketing materials — printed QR codes, old blog posts, email archives — the rate is even worse because nobody revisits them.

A dead link in a printed brochure is permanent. The brochure is still out there; the link is not. That is the difference between link rot and other marketing problems: you do not get a second chance to update print.

What a dead link really costs

The obvious cost is the lost visitor who clicked and hit a 404. But the hidden costs are bigger: a dead link in a campaign report looks like a failed channel, even when the channel was great. A dead link shared by a customer makes your brand look abandoned. And dead links in your own content quietly destroy your SEO — search engines treat them as a signal of neglect.

How to keep links alive

Three layers of protection, in order of effort:

• Monitor everything — run health checks on every destination so you know the moment a site goes down, not months later.
• Redirect strategically — when a page moves, keep the old link working with a redirect.
• Insure critical links — use a service that automatically serves visitors an archived copy (Wayback Machine, Google cache, or your own mirror) when the original destination dies.

The Keevala answer: Undying Links

Undying Links is destination insurance. Keevala probes every insured link in the background; the moment a destination stops responding, visitors are automatically rerouted to a live copy from the Wayback Machine, Google cache, or your custom mirror — while you get notified so you can fix the root cause.

Your links keep working when the internet breaks underneath them. That is the difference between a link and an asset.