What link rot is (and what to scan)

Link rot is the slow death of hrefs and image URLs. Nobody plotted it. A vendor changed a PDF path. A partner sunset a landing page. Your own CMS recycled slugs. A year later the article still ranks and the citation 404s.

It is the same class of problem as a broken link, just named from the maintenance side: time did it.

Where it concentrates

• Footers and “resources” blocks nobody owns
• Author bios with personal domains
• Outbound citations in old posts
• Promo banners after the campaign folder was deleted
• src on images after a DAM migration (broken images)

Internal rot (your nav, your sitemap) is the first queue. Outbound rot is a quality issue on the page, not a ranking lever you can game.

Cadence

There is no universal “every 14 days.” After a redesign, scan immediately. On a quiet brochure site, a quarterly whole-site pass plus a page scan before you publish is enough. See how often to check.

Chrome is useful because rot hides in JS-injected menus and lazy images. Export CSV, ticket the template-level failures first.

You will not freeze the web. You can stop shipping a homepage whose third button is already dead.