Combating

The WordPress blog publishing systems implements a guard against link rot. If an author renames a link, the old link automatically redirects to the new location.

Web archiving

To combat link rot, web archivists are actively engaged in collecting the Web or particular portions of the Web and ensuring the collection is preserved in an archive, such as an archive site, for future researchers, historians, and the public. The largest web archiving organization is the Internet Archive, also known as the "Wayback Machine", which strives to maintain an archive of the entire Web, taking periodic snapshots of pages that can then be accessed for free and without registration many years later simply by typing in the URL. National libraries, national archives and various consortia of organizations are also involved in archiving culturally important Web content.
Individuals may also use a number of tools that allow them to archive web resources that may go missing in the future:
WebCite, a tool specifically for scholarly authors, journal editors and publishers to permanently archive "on-demand" and retrieve cited Internet references.
Archive-It, a subscription service that allows institutions to build, manage and search their own web archive
hanzo:web is a personal web archiving service created by Hanzo Archives that can archive a single web resource, a cluster of web resources, or an entire website, as a one-off collection, scheduled/repeated collection, an RSS/Atom feed collection or collect on-demand via Hanzo's open API.

Webmasters

Webmasters have developed a number of best practices for combating link rot:
Avoiding unmanaged hyperlink collections
Avoiding links to pages deep in a website ("deep linking")
Using hyperlink checking software or a Content Management System (CMS) that automatically checks links
Using permalinks
Using redirection mechanisms (e.g. "301: Moved Permanently") to automatically refer browsers and crawlers to the new location of a URL

Authors citing URLs

A number of studies have shown how wide-spread link rot is in academic literature . Authors of scholarly publications have also developed best-practices for combating link rot in their work:
Avoiding URL citations that point to resources on a researcher's personal home page (McCown et al., 2005)
Using Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs) and digital object identifiers (DOIs) whenever possible
Using web archiving services (e.g. WebCite) to permanently archive and retrieve cited Internet references (Eysenbach and Trudel, 2005).