Broken internal links after moving a page are not detected

  • Resolved dinhac

    (@dinhac)


    4 months, 1 week ago

    Hi,
    we use the local version of the Broken Link Checker on our website and found it works well until now.
    What happened? We had to move a page to another space of our website. Afterwards, I manually triggered a new check of all links on the website within Broken Link Checker plugin. Result: No broken internal links are found. Nevertheless, all pages who link to the former link target of the now moved page show a “page not found” error when clicking the old link.

    So the Broken Link Checker is not really useful if it can’t detect broken internal links. Please help us with this.

    Note: Our website is not public but only available for our registered customers so I won’t share the URL here.

    We use version 2.4.2 of the plugin. WP Core 6.7.1.

    Thanks in advance!

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
  • Plugin Support Laura – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudev-support8)

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Hi @dinhac ,

    I hope you’re doing well and thanks for reaching us.

    With internal links do you mean links in your wp-admin? Or at any dashboard?

    Could you please give us more info about where those links should be checked? Maybe using a dashboard created with a specific plugin?

    I hope to hear back from you soon.

    Best Regards,
    Williams Valerio

    Thread Starter dinhac

    (@dinhac)

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Hi @wpmudev-support8,

    thanks for your reply.

    With internal links, I mean that we have several pages which link to each other.

    Context: We offer user manuals for our customers, so e.g. there is content on one page which relates to another page’s content.

    Our global link structure defined in the WP permalinks settings is “Post Name” => https://our-domain.com/pagetitle/.

    We moved a page from https://our-domain.com/manuals/ui/pagetitle/ to https://our-domain.com/manuals/ui/global/pagetitle/.

    As a result, the obsolete URL https://our-domain.com/manuals/ui/pagetitle/ leads to a “Page not found” notice now when we click on it on the pages containing this link.

    We would expect the Link Checker plugin to detect these broken links. But it doesn’t.

    We use the following settings:

    Interval for the link check: 36 hours. In addition, we triggered the link check manually after we were informed by one of our editors that he had moved the page.

    (Since we have an editor group, our desired scenario would be that the Link Checker detects when anyone has moved a page to another directory and if links are broken as a consequence of this. So that we as admins can just monitor that all links on the website are working well by checking the Link Checker results regularly.)

    Links to be checked: HTML links, HTML images, plain text URLs

    Link search in: posts, pages, homepages, templates

    Post status: Published, Private

    I hope these informations help you investigating the issue?

    If you have further questions regarding it please let me know.

    Thank you

    Plugin Support Kris – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport13)

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Hi @dinhac

    Thank you for the additional data. I made a test on my lab site and such a scenario is not possible by default in WP core. By that, I mean moving the site into another parent using WordPress Attributes. Please note we do not have information on how you made this part:

    We moved a page from https://our-domain.com/manuals/ui/pagetitle/ to https://our-domain.com/manuals/ui/global/pagetitle/.

    and that is why in my test I used WordPress Attributes to simply change the parent of that page. As a result, I did not end up with a 404 page, but with a redirect which WP core keeps in a database for such cases, and a new URL of that page.

    Can you let us know what steps you have made to “move page”?

    Kind Regards,
    Kris

    Thread Starter dinhac

    (@dinhac)

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Hi @wpmudevsupport13,

    thank you for testing and for your reply. We used the plugin Nested Pages (https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-nested-pages/) to change the parent of the page. And yes, I would have expected too that there would be an automatic redirect by WP core afterwards. But obviously this is not happening.

    I double-checked this now by creating a new page tree with a parent and three child pages for test purposes. Then I inserted on two of these child pages a link to a third child page. After that, I moved the third page via drag & drop in the nested pages view in wp-admin backend up to the same level as the former parent page. As a result, the links on child pages 1 and 2 to former sibling 3 are broken now.

    In the Nested Pages plugin settings footnote, I found the following note:

    **Important: Changes to the page structure can have an impact on SEO and existing inbound links. Unintentional URL changes can be prevented by deactivating the nesting function. The sorting function within the existing page structure is retained. If changes are made to the page structure of a live site, it can be helpful to create 301 redirects from the old to the new addresses.

    What I do not understand is why the Link Checker does not report these resulting broken links?

    You could ask now, why don’t we simply use the option to change the page parent using WordPress Attributes? We did use that. Unfortunately, the related option to determine the sorting order of the child pages “disappeared” with the update to WP core 6.7. We have a lot of nested manual pages, that is why we use the Nested Pages plugin since then.

    Thank you

    Thread Starter dinhac

    (@dinhac)

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Hi @wpmudevsupport13,

    I just found another 404 on a completely different manual page of our website. It’s again the case that we link from one page to another.

    The URL https://our-domain.com/manuals/rent-accounting/accounting/tab-bookings/MB-booking-types.html#MBbookingtypes-standard-classification seems to be a relict from our former helpcenter from where we migrated to WP some months ago. We imported the pages via script from HTML export. That explains, why the incorrect URL contains the ending “.html”. Furthermore, the hash served as an anchor to a specific heading.

    This page, including its headings, was imported by us too. But of course, the mentioned link in its “degenerated” format is not working and produces a 404 when clicking the link on the manual page where it had been inserted during the import.

    What could be the reason the Link Checker is not reporting such a case?

    Thank you for your support!

    Plugin Support Nebu John – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport14)

    4 months ago

    Hi @dinhac,

    Unfortunately, without closely examining the other results and how the pages are structured using the mentioned plugins on your website, it will be difficult to debug the issue and identify its cause.

    To investigate the issue further, I installed the Nested Pages plugin on a test website. I then moved a page under another as a child, which updated the URL as you described. However, I did not observe a 404 error on the old URL—it redirected to the new page, similar to the behavior when using the WordPress attribute.

    Would it be possible for you to share a screen-record of the behavior that you observe at your end? Please also share a screenshot of the screenshot Broken Links results. This will help us to diagnose the issue further.

    We look forward to hearing back from you.

    Best Regards,
    Nebu John

    Thread Starter dinhac

    (@dinhac)

    4 months ago

    Hi @wpmudevsupport14,

    thank you for your efforts! You can download a folder containing screencasts and screenshots concerning the issue from WeTransfer: https://we.tl/t-RJuww5AoPN (link valid until Feb 18th).

    There are 3 subfolders in the download folder:

    1. Broken Link Checker – Settings and Status:
      Perhaps from these you can check whether our plugin settings are adequate. It also shows the status of the plugin when having checked the whole site again after moving the pages like mentioned before: No broken links were detected.
    2. Defect link with invalid html-url:
      The screenshots here show the latest finding with the wrong “html”-url which is not detected by Link Checker either.
    3. Move Pages With Nested Pages + Link Profile Result Before + After Moving:
      This folder contains two screencasts showing the 404s as results of moving the pages “Hauptaktionsbuttons” and the one I specifically created for testing.
      Plus a “before” and “after” screenshot I took from the Link Profile plugin which show that there were 11 posts linking to the page “Hauptaktionsbuttons” before we moved it with the Nested Pages plugin, and afterwards only two remaining: These two are provided via shortcode in combination with the Page List plugin. All other 9 links are broken after having moved the page “Hauptaktionsbuttons”. And obviously, Link Checker does not report this.
      I also added a screenshot of the Nested Pages structure from the test scenario mentioned before.

    Unfortunately, all menu items are in German, since I am not allowed to simply change the language, as this would disrupt the live operation of our site.

    Please let me know if further information is needed to get to the bottom of the matter.

    Thank you!

    Plugin Support Kris – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport13)

    4 months ago

    Hi @dinhac

    Unfortunately, we are still not able to replicate this issue based on data you have send us.

    Please email us at: wpsupport@incsub.com
    Subject: ATTN: WPMU DEV support – wp.org

    Please send:
    – Link back to this thread for reference (https://wordpress.org/support/topic/broken-internal-links-after-moving-a-page-are-not-detected/)

    so that we can review this case more for you and see what will be possible in this case.

    Kind Regards,
    Kris

    Thread Starter dinhac

    (@dinhac)

    4 months ago

    Hi @wpmudevsupport13,

    I sent you an email for further investigations regarding this issue.

    Thank you.

    Plugin Support Kris – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport13)

    3 months ago

    Hi @dinhac

    We haven’t heard from you in a while, I’ll go and mark this thread as resolved. If you have any additional questions or require further help, please let us know!

    Kind Regards,
    Kris

    Thread Starter dinhac

    (@dinhac)

    3 months ago

    Hi @wpmudevsupport13,

    yes, you can close this thread.

    The problem has actually been solved in the meantime, at least to the extent that the Broken Link Checker on our website now reports the broken links caused by renaming and/or moving pages to other directories.
    We do not yet know why. In the meantime, there have been no updates to plugins that we would associate with this issue. We are investigating further.

    We started to correct the broken links manually by replacing them. Maybe that has set something in motion.

    Anyway, the Broken Link Checker is now working as expected again. Very good!

    Thank you.

    Plugin Support Nebu John – WPMU DEV Support

    (@wpmudevsupport14)

    2 months, 4 weeks ago

    Hi @dinhac,

    I’m glad to hear that the issue is no longer appearing.

    If you need any further assistance, please feel free to open a new topic.

    If the plugin was helpful to you, would you consider leaving us a rating?

    https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/broken-link-checker/reviews/

    Your feedback helps us continue offering the plugin for free.

    Best Regards,
    Nebu John

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
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