A missing page, and what it tells us
Harvard researchers once found that more than 70% of web links cited in legal journals stopped working over time. If elite journals can’t keep their references alive, news sites are in even rougher shape. This week, a story referenced from an Amar Ujala link simply wasn’t there. No article, no redirect, just a dead end. That tiny failure is part of a bigger, familiar problem: link rot.
When a page disappears, it’s rarely a mystery. Newsrooms move fast, and their websites change a lot. Editors update headlines, switch content management systems, and merge sections. Old URLs get lost. Sometimes a page is taken down for legal reasons or moved behind a paywall. Translation and transliteration quirks can break Hindi or regional-language slugs. A live blog is archived without a working link. Images live on a separate server and go missing after a redesign. The result is the same for the reader: click, 404.
India’s news ecosystem is especially vulnerable. Dozens of large, multilingual outlets run on a patchwork of old and new tech. Upgrades happen under pressure—during elections, disasters, sport finals—exactly when traffic spikes. That’s when redirects fail and caches get flushed. Vernacular newsrooms also juggle parallel versions of the same story across languages. One page gets updated, another goes stale, and the original reference vanishes.
This isn’t just a convenience issue. When links die, the public record gets holes. A missing investigative story can’t be checked. A quote gets misremembered and spreads. A reporter’s correction, once public, becomes untraceable. Researchers hit a wall. Journalists lose confidence in their own notes. Even basic things—old election explainer pages, COVID dashboards, policy FAQs—slip out of reach. Accountability depends on continuity; link rot breaks it.
Globally, archivists have warned about this for years. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has saved hundreds of billions of pages, but it can’t capture everything. News sites sometimes block crawlers. Subscription paywalls complicate snapshots. Some pages load content dynamically, which archives miss. And when companies move to new vendors or CDNs, old addresses stop resolving. Preservation is a process, not a one-time scrape.
Why pages vanish—and how to fight back
There are a few common causes behind disappearing news pages:
- Website redesigns: New section names, different URL structures, and missing redirect maps mean old links die overnight.
- CMS migrations: Content IDs change, media folders move, and embedded elements break during platform switches.
- Paywalls and premium tiers: A page that was public becomes subscriber-only, and unauthenticated users see nothing.
- Legal takedowns: Defamation claims, court orders, or policy violations can remove pages quietly.
- Localization issues: Hindi or other language slugs, special characters, and emoji in URLs often fail after updates.
- Robots.txt and caching: Overzealous blocking or expired caches keep archives and search engines from seeing pages.
- Ephemeral formats: Live blogs, tickers, and election microsites are treated as temporary and often not preserved properly.
If you hit a dead link, there are practical steps you can try before giving up:
- Search the site: Use the outlet’s built-in search or a search engine with operators like site:domain and a key phrase from the headline.
- Check web archives: The Wayback Machine or other archiving services often have a snapshot, including the text and images.
- Try variations: Remove date folders from the URL, drop tracking parameters, or shorten the path to the slug.
- Look for syndication: Indian news wires and partner sites sometimes republish the same story with a different URL.
- Note the basics: Record the headline, author, and timestamp you saw in search results. That helps you or a newsroom trace it later.
- Ask the newsroom: A quick email or social message can surface a new link, a correction, or an explanation.
Publishers can close most of these gaps with a few disciplined habits:
- Keep permanent IDs: Store a stable article ID and use it in URLs. If the slug changes, the ID stays.
- Map 301 redirects: Before any redesign or CMS migration, generate a redirect map from every old URL to the new one.
- Archive proactively: Trigger automatic snapshots of stories at first publish and major updates, including images and PDFs.
- Respect robots carefully: Allow archiving of public-interest pages. If paywalled, at least preserve the metadata and a teaser.
- Freeze live blogs: After big events, convert live blogs into static, dated pages with a stable URL and table of contents.
- Publish sitemaps and schema: Clean sitemaps and structured data make crawling and archiving more reliable.
- Track 404s: Monitor broken links, fix the top offenders, and keep a visible archive or “moved here” notices for high-traffic pages.
- Handle language slugs: Avoid unstable characters in URLs, or maintain canonical English slugs with proper redirects from local scripts.
There’s also a culture angle. Newsrooms reward speed and scoops, not tidy archives. But preservation pays off—especially for investigative work, public service coverage, and elections. When old stories are easy to find, trust goes up. Corrections are transparent. Readers can follow the chain from update to update without guesswork.
What about legal risks? Yes, archiving can capture things a publisher later corrects or removes. That’s where clear labels help. Keep the original, but add visible notes: corrected at this time, updated with this fact, headline changed. Readers prefer context over vanishing acts. Courts tend to look kindly on transparency too.
And when a story must come down? Provide a short removal notice. Even a one-line explainer—“Removed on [date] due to legal concerns” or “Consolidated into [section]”—beats a silent 404. It shows intent, not neglect.
The stakes are higher in regional news. Local corruption cases, land disputes, environmental reports—these often live only on smaller outlets. If those pages die, there’s no national duplicate to fill the gap. Supporting archiving for regional and language media is not a luxury; it’s foundational to the record.
Back to that missing Amar Ujala page. It could have been a simple redirect issue. It could have moved behind a paywall. Or it might have been pulled. Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same: the trail breaks unless someone preserves it. Readers can help by saving snapshots, noting details, and asking for clarity. Publishers can help by treating their archives as infrastructure, not clutter.
The web was supposed to remember everything. It doesn’t—not by default. Remembering takes work. When we do that work, fewer stories slip through the cracks. And the next time a link goes missing, there will still be a way back.