Help:Fixing dead links

This is a page about how to fight against dead links, a phenomenon often known as, whereby any large enough of a reference site (like this wiki) on the Internet will eventually have more links on it which lead nowhere or to an incorrect target than ones which are live. Dead links are a negative signal to search engines for page ranking, at the least waste readers' times or dash their expectations, frequently drive ad money to organizations unaffiliated with or even actively opposed to the content we cover, and at the worst, may expose users to malicious websites with automated malware downloads which have "squatted" the linked domain after its registration expired.

Finding backups
When you find a dead link, the first thing to do is to check a search engine such as Bing, Duck Duck Go, Google, Yahoo!, etc., to see if the same content can be found elsewhere on a live webpage which appears relatively stable. When such is the case, you should simply change the URL of the link to point to that new location in lieu of the old one.

When this fails, the next step to take is to search Internet archive sites. Two such prominent sites are the Internet Archive at https://archive.org and archive.is, at https://archive.is - if the content can be found on such sites, use one of the steps below to help fix it.

Archiving normal external links
Given an ordinary broken link that occurs in the text of a page directly, follow the below matrix to point it at an archival site by using the Archived link template.

Archiving web citations
The Cite web template is used extensively on this wiki to create citations to online articles. If such an article disappears and its contents can be found in an archive, change the template invocation to use Cite web archived, and add two parameters to the end of the invocation: points to the location at which the site is now archived, and  optionally names the domain name of the archive site to provide the end user more information about the site they're about to visit.

When to remove a link
As per our editing guidelines, links being used as references should not simply be removed from an article because they are dead. Whenever possible, even if the above steps fail, preserve the link in some fashion. If the link is reaching a harmful or irrelevant site, you may surround its hyperlink with tags to stop it from becoming an active hyperlink, comment it out using HTML comment syntax and add explanatory text to the article which compensates, or other palliative actions. If the link is not a critical or reliable citation to begin with, however, then it may be removed at your discretion. When possible, try to find another better source to use instead.