Unlinking does not seem to work.

Normally the “unlink” function turns a link into plain text. In other words, it removes the HTML code of the link. The anchor text stays in the post, but it is no longer a link.

I’m not sure what could cause that process to fail. Could you post the HTML code of the affected link? Also, try re-saving the post (without changing anything) – does the link show up in the plugin after that?

Here’s the resulting code. Broken link checke can’t find it after re-saving post, but I do see that something happened here. How come its still being picked up by the MOZ crawler (and google as well then I presume) ?

<a class="image-left broken_link" href="https://mysite.com/files/2011/10/image.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-6689" src="https://d2jmmsd21wt5vl.cloudfront.net/files/2011/10/image.jpg" alt="" width="159" height="240"><noscript><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-6689" src="https://d2jmmsd21wt5vl.cloudfront.net/files/2011/10/image.jpg" alt="" width="159" height="240" / /></noscript></a>

Is that the code from the post editor, or the when viewing it as a visitor? I ask that because usually the “broken_link” class is added dynamically and won’t show up in the editor.

If the code is from the site front-end and not the editor, the presence of that “broken_link” class would indicate that the *does* find the link. It couldn’t add that class otherwise.

And what do you mean by “something happened here”?

How come its still being picked up by the MOZ crawler (and google as well then I presume) ?

Well, the link is still there. Why wouldn’t another crawler pick it up?

By the way, this part looks suspicious:

<img class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-6689″ src=”https://d2jmmsd21wt5vl.cloudfront.net/files/2011/10/image.jpg&#8221; alt=”” width=”159″ height=”240″ / />

There are two forward slashes before the closing angle bracket of that image tag: / />. There shouldn’t be any slashes.

The double slash seems to have been an error when I pasted it here.

I guess I did not fully understand the way the plugin works, the crawler picked it up as a broken link so I’m not sure what that extra class does, its supposed to turn it into plain text right?

I guess I did not fully understand the way the plugin works, the crawler picked it up as a broken link so I’m not sure what that extra class does, its supposed to turn it into plain text right?

Yes, that’s what’s supposed to happen. I’m not sure why it didn’t work, which is why I’m asking all those questions about the code – it might provide some clues as to what went wrong.

Again, could you please clarify – is the code you pasted here from the post editor, or the page source code?

That was from the page source, not the editor.

Okay, that explains the “broken_link” class – the plugin automatically adds it to links that it has detected as broken. Assuming that you’re not looking at a cached page, that means the plugin still has the link in its database. You might be able to find it in Tools -> Broken Links -> All by searching for the link URL (or part of the URL).