dead links · a practical guide
Was that page a 404, or just a blip?
You saved the link last week. Now it 404s. Before you mourn the page, check whether it is really gone. Most dead links are not as dead as they look, and the ones that are gone often leave something useful behind.
What link rot is, and why it happens
Link rot is the slow decay of the web: pages move, sites get redesigned, projects shut down, and every one of those events breaks a link somewhere. Researchers have found that a meaningful share of links in old articles and academic papers no longer resolve after a few years. The web does not disappear all at once. It crumbles one URL at a time.
So when a link fails, the first question is not "why is this broken". It is "what actually happened to this address".
How to check whether a page is really gone
- Hard-refresh first. A cached error page can outlive the fix. Reload once with the cache bypassed before you believe the 404.
- Try the bare domain. If
example.com/pageis gone butexample.comloads, the site is alive and the page probably moved. Check the navigation for where it went. - Ask the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive's web.archive.org has snapshots of billions of pages. Paste the dead URL in and you can often read the page as it was.
- Search for the title. Quote a distinctive phrase from the page in a search engine. If the content moved to a new site, the search will find it.
- Check the whole domain. If the domain itself no longer resolves or serves nothing, the project behind it ended. That is a different kind of dead.
A useful rule of thumb: a 404 on a living site is usually a moved page. A 404 where the whole domain is gone is a finished story.
What a dead page leaves behind
When a website dies, the domain usually outlives it. Names get dropped, registrations lapse, and other people pick them up for new projects. That is how the web recycles itself: one person's abandoned domain is another person's brand new start.
If you own a domain whose old site is gone, you are sitting on the exact same opportunity. The name may still carry meaning, links, or simply a great sound. What it needs is a new idea attached to it.
DomainRiff exists for that moment. Type in the domain you own and an AI agent writes three distinct possible futures for it: three audiences, three business models, three ways to bring the name back to life. You pick the one you like, prove you own the domain, and get a build-ready report with a prompt, logo directions and a colour palette.
See what a second act looks like
The DomainRiff demo: what one domain became next, in under a minute.
The page is gone. The domain is not
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