Scans are skipping or missing links

Hello @nyakuza

Hope you’re doing well today! Thank you for reaching out to us.

I am sorry to hear about the issue you are facing. Can you please share examples of some links on the page you shared, that are showing up fine and some examples of the links that are being skipped?

This will enable us to make further checks on the page that you have already shared and troubleshoot the issue further.

I am mentioning this as I tried to replicate the issue by adding links on a test page on my lab site and all the links were reported fine.

Kind Regards,
Saurabh

Hi,

A good example can be found in section 2 of the page, which you can access here:
https://www.lambethappp.co.uk/hospital-discharge-and-community-support/#2_Discharge_Planning

There are 6 links in that section. However the link checker results show only 4 from there.

It has the first 2 links, from the first 2 paragraphs:
Appendix 1: Discharge to Assess – Operational Process
Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment?

But the following links (found in the 3rd paragraph) are missing from the Link Checker results:
Mental Capacity
Adult Safeguarding

Then the results show the links below them, in the fourth and fifth paragraphs:
Capacity Tracker
Disabled Facilities Grant

Hi @nyakuza

I gave a quick check in my system by adding the same URLs in my test page but it appears to pick all the mentioned URLs without any issue with a 200 as its status response in the BLC local scan.

Could you please confirm by searching the missing URL as shown in the following screenshot to be sure in case they aren’t picked under any other tabs with any specific errors?

View post on imgur.com

Could we also know whether you notice any difference after re-running a new scan? or is it always the same as you have mentioned?

Could you also run a quick test by creating a new page and copying the mentioned paragraph and the related links to see if the links are picked on a new page or if is it the same?

The above will give us a better idea regarding the issues noticed.

Kind Regards,

Nithin

Hi,

I tried using the search, as shown in the screenshot. Although it shows 1 or 2 instances of those missing links from other pages, it does not list any from the page I used as my example. And they should definitely be showing up for a lot more pages, as they are commonly linked to throughout the site.

I ran the Forced Recheck feature, as I’ve tried before, but I still get the same results.

I then created 2 test pages – one containing only the 6 links from the example page, and one containing the 6 paragraphs of content with the links. I then ran Forced Recheck again so it would scan them.

For the 2 new test pages it didn’t pick up any of the links at all. The pages are live on the website, but they aren’t connected to any other pages. Does the link scanner look at all posts/pages in the system, or only those it can find by manually crawling the site? If so should I connect these test pages via links to other pages so the crawler can find them?

Hello @nyakuza

Thank you for sharing more information.

Based on shared links I ran some tests in my lab site but couldn’t replicate the issue so it appears the problem is specific to your website.

My suggestion is to first make sure published pages is enabled in scanner and if you haven’t noticed any issues with plugin settings run a plugin conflict test by disabling other plugins.

View post on imgur.com

You can find more information about conflict test in this document, it would be better to test it on staging site or create a full backup before doing that:
https://wpmudev.com/docs/getting-started/getting-support/#conflict-test

Kind Regards,
Amin

Hi@nyakuza,

Since we haven’t heard from you for a while. I’ll mark this thread as resolved for now. Please feel free to open a new thread if you need any further assistance.

Best Regards
Nithin