Checking for broken links

You can use the reciprocal link checker functionality to check for broken links. Just set the reciprocal link field to the same address as the main link field and it will tell you if links are broken.

Please consider donating to support this plugin’s development.

I can’t seem to get this to work. I tried adding reciprocal links, as you suggest, to a few of my links but when I try the Reciprocal Link Checker, I get the message ‘Website unreachable’ for all the links for which I have added the reciprocal link field, even though I have checked that they are all valid, working links.

I wasn’t sure what to put in the search string field of the Reciprocal Link Checker, since I’m not actually looking for reciprocal links.

If I leave this field completely blank, then I get no error messages at all – not even for a link that I have planted deliberately as a broken link. But, if I put text into this field, I get the ‘Website unreachable’ message for every link that has a reciprocal link field, regardless of whether the link is good or broken.

What am I doing wrong?

Sorry about that. I did not test before answering. I will verify in next day or two and get back to you.

Oh dear, I think I may have identified the problem. Looking in my debug.log file, I found I was getting the error message

wrapper is disabled in the server configuration by allow_url_fopen=0

Further Googling of this error, indicates that this is dependent on a PHP setting which only the server administrator can alter. Assuming that my host (Namesco) has deliberately disabled this option, it looks like I won’t be able to use the Reciprocal Link Checker within your plugin.

Any other ideas?

That would do it. I can think of an alternative, but that will require some development on my part. I recently found an API that WordPress provides to retrieve remote content and will look at adding support for it in the reciprocal checker.

I will let you know when I have implemented this.

I implemented a change in the reciprocal link checker that should make it work on your site. I also added a button to do a broken link check instead of having to copy the URLs to the reciprocal link field.

Just update to the latest version to get the new code and confirm if this works on your server with the configuration you have in place.

Please consider donating to support this plugin’s development.

Many thanks for such prompt action.

There’s an issue with the WordPress Link Library plugin page; it still reports that 5.9.10.4 is the most up to date version, despite info in the Changelog about the update to 5.9.11. This meant I wasn’t able to update directly from the plugin page. But I downloaded the zip file to my PC and installed it via FTP and your modifications to the Reciprocal Link checking page appeared.

Tried out the modified Reciprocal Link Checker and your new Broken Link checker and both worked for me. Success!

My WordPress dashboard, however, is still reporting that I have version 5.9.10.4 installed.

Delighted with this plugin and your prompt response, so have made a modest donation.

Did you notice my queries about the User Submission form? I added them into my previous query ( a week ago) about the Search form (which was probably a mistake on my part) but there has been no response from you. Should I log these questions in a separate thread?

I’m experiencing one issue with the broken link checker. The report included a set of blank links at the head of the report, each with the error 403:

: Error 403

I think it is finding some remnants of deleted links and checking these too. To verify my suspicion, I counted the number of blanks at the top of the report, then deleted another link and, sure enough, the number of blank error reports increased by one.

Thanks for the donation. Indeed, I forgot to bump up the version number in the plugin. Only moved up the version in the readme.

I will investigate this issue with the ghost links soon.

I did see your user submission form question and have just not gotten to it yet.

Corrected issue with ghost link items. Will be in the actual 5.9.11 version soon. I did not bump up number since no one got notified of previous update from yesterday.

Marking as resolved.

Yes, problem is fixed. Thanks.