I would delete the duplicates then check the menus under
Appearance → Menus for any links highlighted in red and replace them with the matching undeleted version of the page.
Another thing you can do after deleting the duplicates is use a link checking plugin such as
https://wordpress.org/plugins/link-checker/
or
https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Hope this helps. Once you find a solution you are happy with kindly tag the thread as resolved. Happy Blogging!
I was hoping for something more straightforward, where you could see at a glance: “this page has 3 inbound links”, or “this page has no inbound links”… Is there any plugin that can do that?
Oh, I do not know of any way to get that info. Also, now that you explain it that way I have realized I did not understand the question at at all.
Let’s see what others suggest. Sorry I could not be of more help.
I kind of like this plugin…
https://wordpress.org/plugins/trash-duplicate-and-301-redirect/
It does a good job of helping detect duplicate content… The Pro version will also create a 301 redirect as it goes but I usually delete the older duplicate content and create the redirects myself using this site.
https://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.html
And I’d run the broken link Checker plugin that @binarywc mentioned above to detect any missing links when/if removing a dupe didn’t get a 301 setup properly.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
One caveat on the broken link checker is… that thing can be quite a resource hog with its default settings. I set it from the 72 hours to about 480 hours once I’ve run it for a couple of days.
It will still detect problems just fine at that setting but you could have an issue with a newly modified post until it catches it. The 480 hours setting seems to be a good fit though rather than disabling the plugin completely once it’s done its job.
@jnashhawkins What I suggested was not what he was looking for and I do not think what you suggested is much closer. I may be wrong but I have a feeling that he is looking for a third-party test/tool/plugin that will show him pages that are linked to from around the web.
Ermm… no. I’m just looking for a plugin (or some other method) that allows me to see if a page has any inbound links from the site itself (obviously, knowing if someone somewhere in the entire web has linked to a page is much harder, so I’m not really expecting that).
As for the “Trash duplicates” plugin, I’ll have a look at it, but I don’t know if it will work in my case; among other things, I’d like to know what criteria it uses to compare posts and decided whether they are identical or not. Still, I’ll investigate it.
What I’ve recommended is what works for me on some heavily loaded aggregator sites where a duplicate slips in from time to time.
Those tools together make a decent solution to what I see as really needed.
I have another site that recycles its older posts and uses RSS feeds from three other sites to handle ‘timeliness’ issues and from time to time there will be a duplicate there. I run the same ‘plugin stack’ and methods there on all four sites to help stop the duplicates.
It’s a pretty good system in my opinion for both situations. I offer that in lieu of a plugin or stack that I’ve yet to find… I’m not sure it really exists.
The 301s ‘blanket fix’ the issues regardless of any links and the Broken Links Checker is a ‘safety net’ in case I mess up when dealing with an issue.
Another thing the Broken Links Checker can do is ‘strike through’ any broken link that it finds as a quick reminder that a link isn’t leading anywhere.
I like that for my client sites as a broken link there will often prompt them to call for help or an explanation of the issue.
That plugin can really help ‘us older admins’ who miss things like I do. I need all the help I can find <GRIN>.
@pauljbis ok so I did understand the question correctly the first time. You have two slightly different methods above to do what your attempting to do.
Using a 301 redirect on a trashed duplicate to redirect the link to the duplicate you decided to keep will cause any external links to go to relevant content which should be your goal.
The broken link checker will help you find any other issues including anything you might break internally.
You might also look at your referrer logs with an eye toward ‘destinations’. I’d actually be looking there more for 404 errors but the destination is there or else there’s a 404 error.
There’s one other little trick I’ll mention…
There’s a web crawler called HTTrack That will crawl your website from a Windows or Linux box to gather together the whole site and there’s a log file of the ‘crawl’ to point out errors. Probably overkill but I consider it a great tool.
Plus you might find this interesting…
https://make.wordpress.org/support/user-manual/building-your-wordpress-community/trackbacks-and-pingbacks/
If you wish to really dig into this subject there’s a few links in the article including one to the codex article on the subject. May not help you much with older external links but some webmasters/admins find this mechanism helpful.
