High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Link rot (or linkrot), also known as link death or link breaking, is an informal term for the process by which increasing numbers of links (either on individual websites or the Internet in general) point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable. The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update out-of-date web pages that clutter search engine results. A link that does not work any more is called a broken link, dead link or dangling link.