Links
Summary
The Summary page for Links provides a snapshot of the following data:
- Links overview
- Pages with broken links
- Broken links
- Clicks on broken links
- PDFs with broken links
- Broken links in PDFs
To view a full report, click on View all at the bottom of that section. Once you’re on the full report, you will be able to take action on any broken links that have been identified.
If no broken links were found during Siteimprove’s crawl of your site, you’ll see a message highlighted in green that says no broken links were found.
Pages with Broken Links
The Pages with broken links report page shows you all pages on your site that have been identified as having one or more broken links on them. You will also be able to identify how many broken links are on each page and how many clicks there have been on each one.
Siteimprove scans for broken links each time it crawls your site. Therefore, any broken links that are reported just recently appeared (since the last crawl) or were not fixed since the previous crawl.
How to fix broken links using this report
- To view the link that has been flagged as broken, click on the arrow next to the number under the Broken links column.
- Look at the information about the broken link, specifically the link status.
- Any status of Broken link (confirmed), with an HTTP status of 404: Not Found, means this is a broken link and need to be fixed.
- Any status of Needs review, with an HTTP status of Timed out, means that this is not a confirmed broken link, but should be reviewed. If you click on the broken link and confirm that it’s broken (receive a 404: Not Found page), then you will need to fix it.
- If you’re not sure if the link is broken, or just want to confirm that it is, click the URL of the flagged broken link.
- If you know it’s a broken link and want to find where it is on the page, click the URL of the page that shows up in the URL column.
- A new tab will open. Once the page loads, the page will scroll to the exact place where the broken link is located. It will be highlighted in red. [ See Example ]
- If you haven’t already, you can click the link that’s highlighted here to check to see if it’s broken.
- For this step, you will need to make sure you’re logged into your website. To fix the link, click the Edit in CMS shortcut at the top of the page.
- You will be redirected to the backend of that page in WordPress where you will be able to make your edits.
- Once you’ve fixed the link, update your page in WordPress and check to make sure it’s working.
- To fix additional broken links, repeat Steps 2-9.
Broken Links
Similar to Pages with broken links, this report displays the URL of any broken links that were found on your site. This is helpful if you prefer to see the broken link first rather than the page that the broken link(s) are on.
In addition, there are three categories that you can view:
- Confirmed broken links: Links that point to 404 pages
- Links to review: Links that aren’t necessarily broken but were reported as not working for one reason or another
- Dismissed links: Any links that are working and you have dismissed (i.e. false positives)
How to fix broken links using this report
Confirmed broken links
- Click Confirmed broken links at the top to view all links that point to 404 pages.
- If you want to view the page that has been flagged as broken, click on the arrow next to the number under the Pages column.
- Most pages will report a 404: Not Found status. However, there may be some other error codes reported. In that case you will want to check the link to confirm that it is broken.
- Once you’ve confirmed the link is broken, you can click on the URL of the page under Referring pages to see where on the page is located, or you can edit the page directly by clicking on the CMS button. (Note: You will need to be logged into your (WordPress) site for this to work properly.)
- If you clicked on the URL, a new tab will open. Once the page loads, the page will scroll to the exact place where the broken link is located. It will be highlighted in red. [ See Example ]
- If you haven’t already, you can click the link that’s highlighted here to check to see if it’s broken.
- For this step, you will need to make sure you’re logged into your website. To fix the link, click the Edit in CMS shortcut at the top of the page.
- You will be redirected to the backend of that page in WordPress where you will be able to make your edits.
- Once you’ve fixed the link, update your page in WordPress and check to make sure it’s working.
- To fix additional broken links, repeat Steps 2-9.
Links to review
- Click Links to review at the top to view all links that need to be reviewed.
- Click the URL of the link in the Link column to see if it’s working or not.
- If it’s not working, follow Steps 2-9 above.
- If the link is working, it should clear when Siteimprove crawls your site next. However, you can dismiss the link by clicking on the Dismiss button on the right and selecting Dismiss Now or Dismiss Forever.
Dismissed links
Any link that you dismiss will be recorded here. If you accidentally dismissed a broken link or a link you dismissed that was working is no longer working, you can undo the dismissal and it will tag it as a confirmed broken link.
Links to Unsafe Domains
These are domains that have been identified as potentially risky by Google’s Web Risk API. An advisory is provided by Google in regards to Web Risk.
If users go to potentially risky domains through links on your site, this can reflect negatively on your site’s trustworthiness.
As you add links to external-facing websites on your site, make sure you are pointing to a trusted page. Look for https:// in the URL. If a site does not have https://, consider if it is a safe site to link to before adding it on your site.
PDFs with Broken Links
Note: There is also a Broken links in PDFs report in Siteimprove under the Links category.
The PDFs with broken links report displays all PDFs that are hosted and linked on your site that contain one or more broken links.
You will not be able to fix any broken link within a PDF through Siteimprove. Siteimprove will only identify that a link is broken and what the error message is. It is possible that some links included in your PDF that aren’t identified as a 404 may work at the time you check them and can be dismissed.
To view the PDF through Siteimprove, click on the file path for the PDF in the Document title column. To verify if the link is broken, you can copy and paste the link (by clicking the arrow under Broken links) into a browser. You can also click on the link in the original PDF to verify its working status.
To fix the link, you will need to have access to the original file that was uploaded to your site.
What PDFs are scanned on my site?
Only PDFs that are linked somewhere on your site will be crawled and scanned by Siteimprove. If you have PDF files uploaded to your WordPress Media library but aren’t linked anywhere, those will not be crawled and won’t show up in this report.
Removing old and out-of-date PDFs from your Media library
It’s important to do a regular audit of your site and Media library and remove any files that you no longer need. This will help reduce the number of files that you don’t want people to have access to which show up in search result pages. If you don’t own or have access to the file that needs to be removed, contact the department who owns it and ask them to remove it.
Siteimprove QA Resources
- Guides & FAQs: Quality Assurance
- Creating inclusive content
- Quality Assurance: Broken Links and Misspellings