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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

It may be an old article now, but the point still stands all these years laters. Like, I get it. If the site shuts down, then the URLs are obviously going to change there.

But the sheer amount of times where sites get redesigned and somehow every link to the site breaks at once is utterly ridiculous. There's zero reason to change your URLs every time you change CMS, and there's even less of a reason not to redirect the old URL format to the new one.

Yet somehow it happens constantly, especially on news sites which seem to love changing their site structure every few months or something. Sigh.

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I think there are clear reasons for this.

1. Using URL schemes that come with the framework. Change of framework breaks everything.

2. Simply not caring. If the site is commercial, preserving rarely accessed parts for the sake of consistency is not important for them. PR carousel with big stock images and 1-3 sentence empty statements is the norm. You are not supposed to "use the site" you are supposed to come trough channels and campaigns that are temporary.

The obvious reason is every single document you publish is a liability and potentially a burden. At minimum, it is a cognitive burden and additional responsibility. If it weren't a liability, why bother killing the links? If it weren't a cognitive burden, how could they have forgotten to keep the old URL structure in place?

Everything is temporary. Archive what you care about if you really need it to last.

>There's zero reason to change your URLs every time you change CMS, and there's even less of a reason not to redirect the old URL format to the new one.

Are you willing to pay them for that work?

No?

There's your reason.

Existing links to your site should be fairly valuable. Search engines know what links there, users following links from other pages think your site is more useful than the current page.

Last time we redesigned a major site, we carefully analyzed every URL for organic traffic value. Most were worthless: barely indexed by Google and receiving at most a couple visits a month. We killed most of them and saw improvements in overall traffic from search.

I think a lot of folks originally thought of websites like reference books. And some should still be thought of that way (Wikipedia, open source documentation, etc). I used to try very hard to keep all URLs functional during site redesigns. We accumulated thousands and thousands of redirects… most of which were never used.

I’ve since come to consider that a lot of sites are more like magazines: useful for a limited time span but not something that needs to live on your shelf forever.

No, but I am willing to stop visiting them and/or linking to them.

Yeah. When a site says "the old xyz.oursite.com pages no longer exist. use the search bar to blah blah", there's 90% chance that I'm just going to close the tab and just try a different (even if non-official) site.

Thanks for proving my point: There's no value in pursuing people who aren't your customers, who aren't providing you value.

If we as end-users want URLs to not rot away, we need to put value on working URLs that convinces webmasters to put in the effort to maintain working URLs.

I mean, if visitors don't convert to value for you, why even bother making a site?

If it’s a business, it certainly makes me less interested in using their product or service. Honeywell’s site has this problem and now I associate their brand with annoyance at trying to navigate dead links to technical documentation. I end up thinking stuff like: “I wish this was a Siemens part” which I can’t imagine is their goal.

Weird question. I'm equally willing to pay for working links as I am to pay for the content, so the variable becomes irrelevant. A broken link is no different from broken content.

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