Sean

Clicking on the ‘All’ column, it turns out BLC local is able to check outbound links, when I have added them in the regional plans, where it says ‘Coverage in # countries’.

https://www.212esim.com/esims/europe-esim-10-gb-30-days-airalo/

And they are all reported as 200 OK. So it would seem these particular sites don’t mind your crawler, where Amazon on the other hand is just being Amazon.

But still, the links in the blue buttons are missed.

So I tried BLC cloud, and it now reports 3 broken links, when it fact they are not. It just can’t see past the ? parameter in the URL, but only to those of certain affiliate websites.

It also found 441 774 links on a site only 3 weeks old? I have only added 480, so far.

It does however report 505 unique URLs, which is about right. The other 25 links are internal pages.

No, I’m not going to sign up for premium support, unless the product first works. Only then, if it breaks, I will pay.

I have since gone back to local, checked all the boxes for ‘Look for links in’, and still it doesn’t see any of the outbound affiliate links in the products nor the Ninja table, which is now set to Legacy.

Hi Nithin,

It is the big blue ‘Buy Direct’ button, on every product page, all of which are external links.

When it comes to firewalls etc, can you not make the BLC crawler act more human like? I would have thought the purpose of BLC is to check for broken links, no matter where the link is pointing? Why else would we use BLC? This has actually been quite an annoyance over the years, especially with links to sites like Amazon.

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for getting back to me. I suppose BLC cloud is an option as I have 4 sites all with BLC.

In the meantime, (I am using Ninja Pro) I’m actually wondering why BLC doesn’t see the links in the individual Woo products, such as this: (made with Divi Builder)

https://www.212esim.com/esims/europe-esim-10-gb-30-days-airalo/

I first input all the products into Woo then the The Ninja table grabs its info from the Woo database, so I won’t mind if BLC ignores/doesn’t see the table as all the links occur twice; in the products, and the table. I think 1 check of each link will be enough?

This site is brand new, about 3 weeks old, so I’m still playing with lots of things, including Woo itself which I have never used, even after 10 years using WordPress.

I thought to use Ajax for the table to allow the whole page to load faster, but again, I probably don’t know what I’m doing, if that will make a difference.

What I am hoping (I must ask them this) that even if any of these products go away, the various providers will do something like the ‘Dogs of Amazon’ where the affiliate cookie is set anyway and users are free to shop for something else. So no, I’m not very worried about any of these affiliate links breaking. I think I’m more curious than anything else.

BLC is otherwise ‘working’ on my other sites where I have outbound affiliate links in normal Gutenberg posts. The problem there is I often get ‘forbidden’ or some other error from BLC, but that I think is for another ticket.

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Sean. Reason: More info

@carolm29 Thanks for that! I do have Broken Link Checker which should tell me if any links to those Woo pages exist in weird places I might have missed, by revealing that they are now broken. I wouldn’t want people trying to visit a useless page, or one that doesn’t exist.

I probably should have shared the actual products I’ll be listing, to give a better idea. I should maybe also point out I’ve never actively used Woo before, apart from some playing around to see how it works. And considering I don’t build sites for other people I never went far with Woo as I’ve never had anything to sell. I still don’t. Hence this post, just to be sure I’m going down the right road.

Basically, I will be listing all eSIM data plans for every country from various providers in order to save people using traditional search engines which often returns tons of useless info with the odd eSIM plan here and there.

I’ve been trying to use Toolset for this, and while it is a very powerful plugin, the learning curve for it is very steep, especially for what I’m planning to do, which is essentially just another e-commerce shop, albeit an affiliate based one. Yes, there is a field where you can input the outbound link after selecting product type as External/Affiliate. It was when I saw that field that I thought Woo would be the best option.

Visitors and search engines will need to be able to easily make sense of and sort between plans (amount of data and duration) providers, countries etc. So no, I don’t think the standard WP layout will work for this, though I did think about it.

Same goes for recipe websites. My wife has one. She could simply add recipes to a standard post, we thought about that when we started it, but WP Recipe Maker makes her job so much easier, and Google also likes it ??

Ultimately I’m going to have several thousand products(eSIM plans) listed, and Woo now seems the best way to go about this, with the help of Toolset for custom searches and views.

So yes, I won’t be needing the checkout, cart and my account pages and thought to remove them, but I will keep and use the shop page. I’ll just be using Woo for its very quick and easy to use cataloguing features. I am notoriously lazy, so I like to look for ways of accomplishing big jobs faster. I’m planning to launch with 1000 eSIM plans(products), and taking no more than a few minutes per plan this shouldn’t take me too long with Woo.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Sean.

Thanks everyone, but Divi just released an update that made the underlines go away. So all is good again.

https://www.divichangelog.com/divi-update/divi-4/version-4-27

So no need to install Gutenberg, which doesn’t get very good ratings and comments.

I guess things like this are yet another example of why auto-updating is a bad idea, unless we can be promised things like this will never happen again? Can there be better communication between software devs, especially between the big players like Divi and WP core when a change is being made that’s going to alter people’s sites?

And this was only the underlining of links which is actually tolerable. What if we are away, something auto-updates and breaks the entire site?

However, this is the nature of open source web dev, it’s only a question of time before breaking changes happen again. At least you can get online at sea, in the air and in the middle of the desert in order to be able to check, or make sure you have someone back home who is watching. The internet never sleeps or takes a holiday, but us humans still need to, every now and again.

No, it won’t. I’ve done it many times, from the hosting control panel. Yes, it can be a bit tricky doing it that way. Sometimes, you don’t even need a complete re-install, you can just replace certain core files, if you know what to look for.

But if in doubt about how to do it safely then rather seek further help from someone who has access to the site and hosting.

It could then be the data was already missing more than 2 days ago, in which case the recent backups would also be missing the data, or that dataset was excluded from any backups.

This is one reason I also make and manage my own backups apart from what my host already does. That way I know exactly what has been backed up and where it is stored. I have learned my lesson the hard way.

Either way, this sound like a bit of a complicated problem that only someone sitting right next to you can help you with, so you can point out what is missing and where it should be. Also combing through logs might help reveal what happened, a process that may take some time.

I assume you have backups (everyone should) Backups are usually included even with cheap budget shared hosting. So first try rolling back to a date before the 15th. Then, do the most comprehensive security scan possible. It sounds like you got hacked, in some way. But only someone with access to the site or hosting account can tell for sure.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Sean.

Only via the hosting account. I’m with Siteground who have something completely unique, but even with cPanel there should be an option in there somewhere to re-install WP with Softaculous, the 3rd party software cPanel use for installation scripts.

Or, if you have backups in the hosting account (which you should) you can try rolling back. Access to such things depends on who actually owns the site and what type/level of access they have granted to you. Are you not the owner?

• This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Sean. Reason: bad grammar, typing too fast
• This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Sean. Reason: Re-phrasing

Yea, I’m not really in the mood to further customise to fix what seems to be an actual problem. I could implement a workaround, only for it to break again when it is properly fixed.

And for the record, I’m not a coder, I’m just really good at searching for and copy/pasting css, html, and even php.

Here is all the custom css I have on this Divi site:

/* Take out the divider line between content and sidebar */ 
main-content .container:before {background: none;}

/* 3 column search results layout */
.cu-blog .et_pb_salvattore_content[data-columns]::before {
content: '3 .column.size-1of3' !important;
}
@media only screen and ( min-width: 981px ) {
.cu-blog .column.size-1of3 {
width: 29%!important;
margin-right: 1%;
}
}

/* H2 Resize on mobile */
@media screen and (max-width: 767px) {
.et_pb_post h2 {
font-size: 24px!important;
}
}

/* mouse over link */
a:hover {
color: #AD1519;
}

/* selected link */
a:active {
color: #AD1519;
}

Yes, you can re-install WP core yourself, in the main updates page of your WP dashboard, if you have full WP admin access to the website.

I have customised the colour to red on hover, at which point the underline goes away. Do you think my custom css has anything to do with it? Then again, its been fine for ages.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by Sean. Reason: added more info

Both iOS and macOS. However, I have stopped using the plugin. I may try again another time. Thanks all the same!