Support » Plugin: Broken Link Checker » 2 broken links not flagged

  • Hello – I am using plugin version 1.8 within WordPress version 3.5.2.

    Yesterday it was brought to my attention by my client that two links were broken. The links were pasted into the page like so:

    /business/lending/meeting-with-a-business-lender-heres-what-youll-need/

    /business/lending/writing-an-effective-business-plan/

    The Lending page had previously been renamed to Loans. I am assuming that the links were not flagged because they were not pasted in as full HTML links. But the links were broken because they were trying to reference the Lending parent page rather than the Loans parent page.

    I did not receive a broken link notification for this instance. Our checker is set to check every 72 hours and the page title change happened months ago.

    Under “What Links to Check” HTML links, HTML images, and Plaintext URLs are all checked off.

    Any idea what happened and if there is a way that I can ensure this doesn’t happen again for links that may have been pasted in within the full HTML link? Thank you very much!

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Did the plugin not find the two links at all, or did it find them but fail to detect that they are broken? Knowing the answer to that would help figure out what exactly went wrong.

    To see if BLC knows about the links, go to “Tools -> Broken Links -> All”, click the “Search” button, enter one of the link URLs (or part of a URL) in the “URL” field and click “Search Links”. Do the links show up? What is their status?

    Note: You are using an outdated version of BLC and an even more outdated version of WordPress. Both are very likely to have a lot of bugs that have been fixed in more recent versions.

    Thread Starter juliabro

    (@juliabro)

    Hi there – Thank you for the quick response! The plugin did not find the two links at all. I did go ahead and search the link URLs within the search field and neither show up at all.

    Oops, I should have remembered this earlier: the plugin can’t detect plaintext links that don’t have a protocol:// prefix. In effect, it can’t find any relative plaintext links.

    This is because there’s no reliable way to distinguish between a relative URL and normal text. For example, all of the following could be syntactically valid relative URLs:

    something
    and/or
    /bin/bash
    ..
    example.zip
    Thread Starter juliabro

    (@juliabro)

    That’s what I assumed. Understandable. It is probably a good idea to look through the entire site to update any plaintext links. Let me know if you know of an easier way to can for these links. I want to make sure they are updated so there are no further issues.

    Thank you very much for your help!

    I faced a similar problem and if you can execute a query on the MySQL database:

    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, ' href="/', ' href="http://www.example.com/') WHERE post_type IN ('post','page');

    Note: replace “http://www.example.com/” with your website address 😉

    That works for HTML links, yes. However, juliabro was talking about plaintext links – no <a href="/thing">...</a>, just a /thing.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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