Link Monitor will be the first feature launched exclusively to our Early Access program and we’re pleased to announce its Beta testing release. Link Monitor will check if all your links are working, and alert you if anything is wrong. This lets you avoid any SEO problems, poor user experiences, or lost revenue from broken links.
We’ve had a lot of people asking for Broken Link checker, and we’re delighted to to announce it’s long awaited upgrade.
What is Link Monitor?
Link Monitor is an advanced broken link checker, available right from the ManageWP dashboard. In addition to checking all the links in all the posts and pages on a website, you’ll get continuous monitoring of indexed links with regular, daily checks. You’ll also be alerted if any unresponsive or broken links are found on the sites that you’re watching.
Why is this important?
Broken links can impact negatively your website position in Google search results and it is best to deal with these links before they potentially become a problem. Since website crawlers use links to ‘crawl’ and index your site, any issue there can lead to parts of your website not being searchable through web engines.
Not to mention that users also expect those links to work. When your website visitor click a link, they expect to be taken to the correct webpage. If the link is unresponsive or broken, that usually leads to a poor user experience.
Luckily, Link Monitor solve these problems for you: you get automatic checks and alerts for any unresponsive or broken links on the sites that you are monitoring. This lets you deal with these broken links in a proactive manner while avoiding any negative impacts on SEO, the user experience or revenue.
And your clients will surely appreciate additional level of vigilance from your side. It is a win-win for everyone.
How does it work?
Once Link Monitor is activated, the website will go into our checking queue. It will go over all the links on a given website (both internal and external), extract them and check their response times and code for you. If the link response code is not 200(OK), the link(s) will be put in a separate tab named “Links with issues.”
Link Monitor will run through all the links on your website (limited to 10K links per website) once a day and alert you if any new issues are detected. And the best thing is that it’s completely run on our architecture, which means that the strain to your hosting will be minimal*.
*Our system will index all the links from your posts and pages, and then run the testing from our infrastructure, leaving your sites under significantly lesser load compared to running the broken link checker directly from your website.
Update (July 25, 2019)
Link indexing is limited to 10K links per website. In case there is more than 10K links on your website, the system will warn you but will not check the links that go beyond this limit.
Once you have all this info, it’s time to deal with these links, and we’ve made it easy for you to take action right from the ManageWP dashboard.
Deal with broken links
When a link is flagged as unresponsive or broken, we’ve given you options in the dropdown to:
- edit the link,
- unlink it from the text,
- add a nofollow tag (this effectively tells search engines to ignore this specific link),
- or to ignore it. Ignoring the link will put it back in the “All Links” tab, and the link will be tagged as “Ignored” so you can easily recognize it.
All of the mention options will change the links directly on your website.
In case you want to see link location within the page or edit it ‘the old-fashioned way’ – we provided 2 additional options (Edit Post & Preview) that will open the page in another tab for your convenience. This way you can edit the link though your regular editor and save the post revision in case you want to revert the changes.
Update!
- In case of multisite setup, Link Monitor will check only the main website.
- We have not tested it against different multilingual setups so we advise caution if you plan to edit the links directly.
Let us know if you find any issues using it against those two use-cases.
How can I try it out?
During the beta testing period, Link Monitor will be exclusively available to our ManageWP Early Access program members.
Since our EA program is open for any and all users willing to provide feedback, there is no reason why you cannot join and try out this new feature.
It will be available from your left side menu and clearly marked as BETA.
After the initial Beta testing period, Link Monitor will be made available under the same conditions as most of our premium tools (with bundle options available as well).
Please note: since it is still in beta, the initial scan might take up to a day to run, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t get the result right away.
Wrapping up
We’re always improving the ManageWP product and can’t wait to hear your thoughts on Link Monitor.
Whether you want to use this right away, or have feedback or improvements to suggest, we can’t wait to hear: let us know through the ‘send feedback’ form or in the comments below. We are looking towards your thoughts and suggestions.
Patro
Is there a way to receive an email alert with all the broken links?
Marko Tanaskovic
There isn’t an option for a separate email just for the broken links. However, you can set up the dashboard to alert you for a number of issues, and you can choose to receive daily email digests.
Kingsley Felix
i can’t find it in my account
Bernie
We have always wanted a tool like this. We have used some external tools to verify links we may have over looked.
However, a lot of the broken links reported don’t appear to be broken when we display the pages. And some of the errors don’t make sense. So here is what we see so far:
1. We have a set of 404 errors on links in posts that do not exist. Perhaps you are checking “draft” posts as well as “published” posts? If that is so, is there a way to select only “published” posts. Our other tools do not flag any of these links listed here.
2. We seem to be getting quite a few errors listed as “Head http://index.php/… However, upon examination of the page with the reported link, we see a reference to the relative page without the “http://index” list there at all. Perhaps the processing of relative links is trying to guess at the complete URL?
These issues make the tool a bit not so useful. It is pointing us to over 200 “need attention” but it takes a while to figure out the page and then we are unable to find the offending information.
If the tool is parsing the source code itself, then it would be VERY help to tell us the page and the line number in the page that contains the problematic item.
Anyhow, it could be a great tool if it did not give what appears to be so many false positive.
We are looking forward to the next release to see if that improves things.
Thanks
Bogdan
This is a really great feature, thank you for implementing this. However, please make it more usable for WP-Multisite installs.
Kingsley Felix
nice one, how do i become a beta tester?
Dave
This is great news, guys, as we can now remove another 3rd party tool/plugin and manage links from within our ManageWP account.
Suggestion: I’d love to be able to add/remove/rearrange the Link Monitor on a website’s Dashboard (via the Advanced View menu). This may be in the works already.
nikhil
Very informative article thank you Mark
Tim
Hey guys, i’m afraid the link checker doesnt show up for me, although i joined the beta program. Any ideas why that could be?
Marko Tanaskovic
There is no reason why you should not see it if you are using ManageWP and you opted in for Early Access.
Clearing the browser cache should solve it. But let us know if it doesn’t.
Alok Sharma
I am unable to see Link Monitor (BETA) anywhere in the ManageWP Dashboard.
Am I missing something?
Marko Tanaskovic
Hi Alok! Try clearing the browser cache and reloading the dashboard. That should solve it.
Alok Sharma
Hi,
It’s showing up now.
Thanks 🙂
Jarrad Langdon
Does this new feature have a limit to how many links can be scanned? We notice that many online tools reach a maximum of X links prior to completing the scan.
Does the new feature display errors within the Client Report?
Jarrad
J-F Arseneault
Hi,
This looks nice… two questions, from your article !
1. You say : “And the best thing is that it’s completely run on our architecture, which means that the strain to your hosting will be minimal.”
Are you saying the links are tested on a copy of our site in your infrastructure, or simply that the link requests are coming from your side, but still hitting the live website?
How much “strain” does this approach remove, in your opinion?
2. You say : “Once you have all this info, it’s time to deal with these links, and we’ve made it easy for you to take action right from the ManageWP dashboard.”
Are you saying that any action I take in the MWP dashboard will go *modify* the link/content directly on the live site?
If so, has this been tested on multilingual sites? Multisites?
And if so, when MWP makes the change to the site, will there be a WordPress revision created for that change, and if so, what WP user will be assigned to that edit/revision?
Thanks !
Marko Tanaskovic
Hi Jean-Francois, very good questions.
Let me jump in and try to answer them the best way that I can.
1. We’re not copying the entire website. Just extracting the links. After that, everything is run on our architecture. Sure, there will be some initial load when the website is indexed for the 1st time (and for checking the internal links) but everything else will be run on our side. This approach should show significant difference compared to broken link checker being run on the website itself.
2. Yes, modifying the link/content will change it directly on the website. No revision point will be created. For those users that want to take this approach (creating a new post revision instead of just changing the link), we added the ‘Edit Post’ link in the Link Source column. Clicking on the link will open the standard editor, just as if you went to the admin dashboard and opened the post editor.
If the post table contains multilingual translations – there is no reason why that content/links should not be included. But we did not test it against different multilingual setups. So, thank you for raising that.
In case of multisite setup, Link Monitor will check only the main website.
Take note that since the main intent of this feature was to deal with broken links changing the text/content was added as additional convenience. If we receive any reports that it is causing issues, we are happy to change or even completely remove the option.
Jeremy C
When does this become available for testing? It’s not currently listed on the left side menu.
Marko Tanaskovic
Link Monitor was released to our Early Access audience at the same time as this article. There is no reason why you should not see it if you are using ManageWP and you opted in for Early Access.
Clearing the browser cache might solve the problem. In case it doesn’t – get in touch with us. We will definitely like to know if there is any issue there.
Nathan Baldwin
Is this going to be available on the client reports?
Marko Tanaskovic
Yes. We’re already working on adding this information to our client reports. But we do not have a final version yet. If you have a preference on how would you like to display this information to your client – now is the time to share that feedback with us.
Anders Alhbin
This was exactly what I was going to ask 🙂
Normally, I will forward this broken link info to my clients that handle the content in their sites, So including this information in the montly reports would be optimnal. A new page called “broken links” with a list of the links not working would of course be the best.
Now I am not sure how the alerts would come to me once new issues id found – via email?
In such case – it would of course also be great if I could setup so the email alerts also goes to the client directly!
Amy
Hi! There is no general “Leave Comment” option, so I just clicked “Reply” on another comment.
This is wonderful, thank you for all your service!
Here are the options that were listed:
1- edit the link,
2- unlink it from the text,
3- add a nofollow tag (this effectively tells search engines to ignore this specific link),
4- ignore it. Ignoring the link will put it back in the “All Links” tab, and the link will be tagged as “Ignored” so you can easily recognize it.
Why would you or a client chose #3 or #4? It seems like you would want to correct links if they are wrong, no?