Delinking: An Exploratory Study

The objective of this exploratory study is to determine the delinking practices of webmasters of colleges and universities in Canada and the US. An online questionnaire was created and all the 92 webmasters of Canadian colleges and universities were invited to complete it while the invitation was extended to only 500 of their counterparts in the US. A total of 123 webmasters responded to the survey with about 88 % of them indicating that they have had to remove external links from their web sites before. According to most of the webmasters, delinking is done as often as required but less than 20 times a year. Reasons for delinking a web site are categorized into obvious (e.g., broken/dead links, and content of linked site is no longer current or relevant) and unobvious (e.g., political/philosophical difference with the owner of the linked site, and request from the webmaster of the linked site). Measures to minimize delinking are discussed.