Broken links found in web scan

[scynthiadunlop]

Problem

ISSUE Broken internal links lead users from one website to another and bring them to non-existent webpages. Multiple broken links negatively affect user experience and may worsen your search engine rankings because crawlers may think that your website is poorly maintained or coded.

Suggest a fix

HOW TO FIX IT Please follow all links reported as broken. If a target webpage returns an error, remove the link leading to the error page or replace it with another resource (301 redirect) to most similar content (URL).

GSheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16NJqdg7TJ8UkVcsY1pxviF6iQTgJaG5YX78yVs6cG5E/

[annastuchlik]

@scynthiadunlop, Hi Cynthia, The report lists the target pages that return an error and possible replacements. Is there a document that lists the pages that include the broken links? I've managed to identify some of the pages, but not all of them, so I can't replace or remove all the broken links.

[scynthiadunlop]

I believe they surfaced when running ScreamingFrog to check for broken links. Let me see if we can get the details on what links there.

[scynthiadunlop]

Oh, maybe this will help? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TDnZod-hxVDFMDUdxM9f7FYOMWfaVgT8rcZ6lQmvN5g/edit?usp=sharing

[scynthiadunlop]

Response: " We do not have that level of detail. Most of these appear to be cases where the URL was changed/updated but a 301 redirect was not put in place. They are like for like pages and the fix is still the same."

[annastuchlik]

Thanks! I'll try to sort it out.

[annastuchlik]

@dgarcia360

This issue is about URLs reported by the SEO site audit tool as 404s. I'm not sure anybody ever tries to use them, probably not, but they keep hurting our SEO and must be fixed.

We weren't able to discover why these links were reported, so I'm no longer trying to find the reason - I'm just adding redirections to the most suitable pages. Could you verify that I'm using the correct link format? Example: What was reported: https://docs.scylladb.com/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-data-file-format/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-statistics/

What I added to the redirects.yaml file:

/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-data-file-format/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-statistics/: /stable/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-statistics.html

[dgarcia360]

@annastuchlik The correct format is:

/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-data-file-format/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-statistics/index.html: /stable/architecture/sstable/sstable3/sstables-3-statistics.html

You should add this line in the redirects.yml file of the scylladb/scylladb repository.

[annastuchlik]

Great, thank you!

[stale[bot]]

Thanks for reporting. This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it had no activity for the last few months, and will be closed if no further action taken. If the issue is valid, please add a comment to keep it alive!

[stale[bot]]

Thanks for reporting. This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it had no activity for the last few months, and will be closed if no further action taken. If the issue is valid, please add a comment to keep it alive!

[annastuchlik]

The provided files don't include the information I could use to address this issue. In most cases, there's nothing to be fixed in the docs, or the source is unclear. Adding thousands of just-in-case redirections is not feasible, as we have to maintain them manually. We use different link checks on our projects to fix actual problems with links (currently, there are some to be fixed, but they are not related to this issue). I'm closing this issue. The actual broken links will be fixed after they are reported by one of the link checkers.