Understanding your Broken Links report

Modified on Mon, 23 Nov, 2015 at 11:07 AM

NOTE: This article pertains only to legacy Plinkit sites that have been imported into Ploud.

While we have made every attempt to preserve the integrity of your site and its resources, some pieces may remain broken. On your site you will find a "Broken Links Report", which is an spreadsheet that will identify content that we were not able to import successfully. This file will be located at:

[your site's home page] /site-assets/files/broken_links.csv

What should I do with this report?

While some of these items represent known issues or are just content that the migration wasn't sure how to interpret, some of them may require manual changes. These instructions will help you understand how to read the report and what to do about what's on it.

In the following table, we will pretend that the link called "google search" is broken and has shown up on the report.

Field Name	What It Tells You	Example
Link Location	The suffix of the URL of the page on which the broken link exists. If you're on your homepage, you can append this suffix to the URL to go to the page in question.	[the URL of this page]
Field	Which section of the page the broken link is in. There are two common categories: text and portlet. Any link listed as being in text can be found in the body of the page. Any link listed as being in a portlet will say something like "portlet:plone.rightcolumn:more-help ", indicating on which side of the screen and in which portlet the link can be found.	text
Broken Link	This field contains the actual text of the broken hyperlink. This can help identify what the problem is - for instance, if the Broken Link is a .jpg or .png file, then it could indicate that an image is missing that was once there.	http://google.com
Link Text	This field contains the human-readable text of the broken link. This can be used to help you find the link when viewing the page on which it exists.	google search

There are a few common situations that lead to broken links. The vast majority of entries on this report will fall into one of these categories, but some may not, so be sure to review each item on your report individually.

Common Problems:

"sinList?synmap="
These links are a vestige of a feature from your old site that is no longer supported. These will either have to remain broken or be removed. Note that this applies to any link that contains the string "sinList?synmap" - because of the way this functionality was used on your old site, many sites will have 30-40 broken links that all result from this issue.
Missing content
In some cases, broken links are a result of missing images or PDF files that were missing in the original site as well. You can check this by navigating to the same location in your pre-migration site and checking the same link as on the new site. These can be resolved by removing the reference to the content or by adding a new image in its place.

You can ignore these items, as they show up on the report because of the way their syntax was interpreted, but still work as expected:

"../" or "../../"
These links direct back to the root of the site (your homepage) and should work correctly.
"callto:[phone number]"
These links open Skype or another VoIP program and should work correctly.