Periodically, a link within your website may become invalid when the page to which it is pointing has changed URLs or is no longer available. Instead of going though all your website pages manually to see if all links are still active, you can use the Broken links report available on your site.
This is a great tool to help you uncover these broken links. However, keep in mind a couple of facts:
- Sometimes a link can fool the system: A link may be valid, but the link checker thinks it isn’t. This can be true for a variety of links, such as those going to Duke Box, or social media (i.e. LinkedIn profile), etc. It’s always good to double check a proposed bad link before changing/deleting it.
- The link checker only lets you know if the link is active, but not if the content/text on the page is what you actually want to link to. For example, if you are linking to an external URL, and the company that owned that URL sold it to another business, you could be linking to content you don’t want to.
This report will not fix any broken links, it simply reports where they exist. An editor will need to determine what the correct address is—if it exists—and manually fix it by editing the node and updating the link. Once the link is updated with the correct link, the report will be updated accordingly.
To access your Broken links report, select Shortcuts from the administrative toolbar, then click the Broken links report link in the shortcuts menu. If this shortcut is not present, you can simply add /admin/reports/linkchecker to your site’s web address in the address bar of your browser.
This report shows a list of all links found on your site, and provides several search and filtering mechanisms to assist with finding specific links. To filter the table so that only links that result in a 404 / page not found error, enter "404" in the Status code text field and click "Apply".
The tabular display shows:
- The URL of the link
- The last time that URL was checked
- The method which was used to check the URL (typically "HEAD" to save bandwidth)
- The resulting Status code and corresponding error
- The Fail count (the number of times a link has consecutively failed)
- The location of the URL (a link to the node and the field in which the URL was found)
- A mechanism to edit the record of this URL and disable further checking
You might find that you need to click within the table then use the right- and left-arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll and view portions of the table which are off screen.
Note: Any broken links in Books or News article - Imported will be handled by Trinity Communications on the main Trinity site which feeds these particular pages to your website.