How should we deal with broken links on posts?

Question

When you create a hyperlink to an article, would you please include the title of the article in the hypertext?

For example, consider the following answer, which doesn't include the titles of the articles it references:

Causes of death are subject to trends and fashions too. ([ref][1])

Child mortality had [declined from 400 in 1000 to 3-8 in 1000][2] in the rich countries
since 1800.

  [1]: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/hsq/HSQ18mortality.pdf
  [2]: http://www.bit.ly/ljRA5E

If these hyperlinks become '404 Not Found' then it would difficult to find them again, because there's no title nor even a direct quote to search for. So instead it would be better to format it as something like,

Causes of death are subject to trends and fashions too; for example
[Put the title of the article here][1] says,

>  Direct quote from the article here.

Answer 1

Basically, when we detect a broken link on any post on skeptics.stackexchange.com, the best and only solution would be to find a cached version of the post and link it back. Based in my experience, one should do the following:

1) Look it up the link on Internet Archive: Wayback Machine.
This is the most efficient solution if it works. The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based non-profit digital library and well-funded, I don't see it going down in 100 years in the future. What you should do is simply and insert the broken link and attempt to find any old version of it there. You then link back the archive.org link.

2) Look it up on Google Cache.
This is the best solution for recent posts who weren't already saved by the wayback machine. To do that either plug the link on the Google search and click on the "cached" option under the search result or type this link on your browser: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://example.com

3) Look it up on Bing.
Bing search is Google's greatest jealous competitor. They copy all the features Google creates and they cache pages also on their search engine. Simply search for the link on Bing, and if find, click on "cached" to find the old version of the post. If you do find a version of link, save it in wayback machine and link the wayback machine link; bing cache is not permanent (same thing applies to Google Cache).

4) Look it up on Yandex, Baidu
Now, it's getting really a hopeless situation, sometimes baidu and yandex cache pages which are not normally cached by Bing or Google. It wouldn't harm to try. Follow the same strategy explained on Bing: plugin link into search - click on cached if found - save the cached link on wayback machine - link wayback machine back on skeptics.

5) Check your offline cache
Really desperate attempt, but if you think you have visited the link you can find a verison of it in your Google Chrome cache.

6) Verbatim-quoted text
As pointed out by the OP, another method is to include some verbatim-quoted text (title and/or content) in the link before it breaks: if the link breaks in the future, then people can find new copies of the document by searching for the quoted text.

7) Search for another version of the same article
Another tip is to look for another version of the same article (e.g. peer reviewed one), or look for the original page on the same site in case they simply changed the structure.

Other than that, I'm not aware of any methods which allows you to view a broken/deleted link. If you know any other method, let me know.