Content - Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications - page 291

delete the entire a element, the <a> and </a> start tag and end tag, or just the href attribute. If you delete
only the href attribute, you can move the old URL into the title attribute for archival purposes, so you'll still
have it somewhere if the site comes back:
<a title="http://www.example.com/foo/">Foo Corp.</a>
There's one important exception. If the link points into your own site, rather than to an external site, you should
either delete the entire element or fix it to point to the new page. However, there's something else you have to
do to. You'll want to set up a redirect so that other sites and bookmarks linking to this page will be redirected to
the new location as well. I'll take this up in the next section.