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Identify broken links using Acquia Optimize
You can easily identify broken links on your site through the weekly reports sent to agencies by Acquia Optimize (formerly known as Monsido).
Within this report you will that the Quality Assurance section will show the number of broken links and potential misspellings on your site:
Acquia Optimize can also show you each page where the broken link appears. First make sure you are logged into Acquia Optimize and then select the "Quality Assurance" button:
From there you will then select the "Unique broken links" section to pull up the list of the broken links.
Within this list you will be able to see each page that has the broken link by selecting the page number which will cause a pop-up window to appear that has a list of all of the pages with that broken link:
Next to have Acquia Optimize to show you where the broken link is at within your page you can select the magnifying glass icon within the right corner of the pop-up window.
If you have Acquia Optimize web browser Chrome extension added it will appear on the right side of the screen after you click on the magnifying glass.
If the web browser doesn't automatically highlight the broken link on the page after you've clicked on the magnifying glass, you can still easily locate it by clicking on the magnifying glass within the web browser pop-up window. It should then highlight where the broken link is on the page.
Marking broken links as fixed within Acquia Optimize
Once you have the broken link located on the page, you can fix it by selecting the edit button that is above the title of your page.
Within the page edit section you can now click the broken link and then to fix it you can select the pencil icon which will appear when you click the link text:
After you have the link fixed, make sure to save the page. Then within the Acquia Optimize Chrome extension browser window you can mark the broken link as fixed by selecting the check mark:
Or you can also mark the broken link as fixed within the Acquia Optimize page by selecting the "Open page details" button next to the magnifying glass.
From the new window that pops up you will select the action button and then you can select the "set to fixed" to also mark the broken link as fixed so that it removes it from your report and thus improving your Quality Assurance score.
Why some links are incorrectly marked as broken
Within your scan report there are several possible reasons for links to be flagged as broken or with errors when they are actually not:
The target server was down at the time of the scan.
A re-scan normally fixes the problem. Within the Action button you can select Mark as Ignored the link to stop checking this link permanently.
- The target server might be set to block site scanners and spiders such as ours:
- Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others block scanners that make many requests to their site. We scan thousands of websites every day and make many requests to these websites and they do often block our scanner. This can cause the scan to hang or stop. In most cases, you can safely ignore the link if you know that it is correct.
- The target server has an invalid HTTPS certificate:
- An invalid certificate causes the link to be marked as dead. Get in touch with the manager of the website and ask them to fix their certificate or ignore the link if this is impossible.
- The link points to a login page:
- The link points to a page that requires a login. Such pages are often tagged as 'dead'. Within the Action button you can select Mark as Ignored the link to stop checking this link permanently.