Broken links and orphan pages

Overview

Dirigible SEO keeps track of the links between the pages of your site. Each time a page, post or other public content is published or saved, its links to other addresses on your site are noted; trashing or deleting a page drops its links. Two reports under SEO → Reports read that record:

• Links to missing pages lists links in your content to an address on this site that nothing answers, so visitors who follow them get "page not found".
• Pages nothing links to lists published pages that no other page, menu or listing links to, so visitors and search engines can reach them only by typing their address.

Nothing is fetched to work this out: every link is checked against what the site itself knows, so the reports cost the site nothing while visitors browse.

Where to find the reports

1. In the WordPress admin, go to SEO → Reports.
2. Open Links to missing pages or Pages nothing links to.

You need an Administrator account.

When you first update

After the update, Dirigible SEO reads every published page once, in the background, in small batches, starting within an hour or two. Until that finishes the two reports show Checking… and how far it has got ("Checked 340 of 1,009 pages so far"). Come back once it says the check is complete. From then on each page is read again whenever it is saved.

Links to missing pages

Each row shows the page holding the link, the address it points to, and the link's text where it has one. The page title opens its editor; the address opens in a new tab so you can see what visitors get.

A link is listed only when nothing on the site answers its address. It is not listed when the address is:

• a published page, post or other content, including an old address WordPress still redirects to the page, or the page's name without its folder (/our-team/ for /about/our-team/);
• a category, tag or other archive, an author page, the posts page, a date archive, the search page or a feed;
• a file or folder that exists on the server;
• a redirect set up in the Redirection plugin.

Links to other websites, to email addresses and phone numbers, to anchors on the same page, and to files in your Media Library aren't checked here. Links in menus, widgets and theme settings aren't read either: only each page's content.

A link to an address that only starts like a page's (/event/ when the page is /event-countdown/) is listed: WordPress no longer guesses which page was meant.

To fix one, edit the link in the page, or add a redirect from the missing address to the right page (the free Redirection plugin does this; once the redirect exists, the link leaves this report at the next check).

Pages nothing links to

A page is listed when no other published page links to it, no menu includes it, and no block picks it or lists its kind. This isn't marked as a problem: a landing page you only share by its address is fine. For everything else, add a link from a related page or a menu, so visitors and search engines can find it.

Left out of this report:

• the front page and the posts page;
• pages hidden from search engines (Private Page (Do Not Index)) or with a canonical URL pointing elsewhere;
• posts, when the site has a blog index;
• content from Dirigible plugins and other plugins (people, events, portfolio, documentation and the like), which their own pages and blocks list;
• menus and footers built as content.

Pages that only a listing built by the theme shows, or that are linked only from a sidebar or widget, can appear here even though they are reachable.

Tips

• Each report shows its first 50 rows. Select Show all at the bottom for the rest.
• The reports are kept for up to 12 hours and worked out again as soon as a page is saved, trashed or deleted. Select Check again at the top of the Reports tab to redo them now.
• After an import or anything else that changed many pages at once, select Read every page again at the bottom of Pages nothing links to: Dirigible SEO reads every published page again in the background.
• Links inside a synced pattern count for every page that uses the pattern, as of that page's last save.