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How do I ignore a broken link?

Sean Needham avatar

Quality Assurance provides details on all internal and external broken links affecting your website. These broken links will need to be fixed via your content management system (CMS), see “How do I fix a broken link?”.  

In some cases, you may decide that a broken link can be ignored. For example, you may decide to ignore a link to a password-protected site that public website users (and crawlers) do not have access to.

This article covers the following areas:

Note: When you ignore a broken link, you are essentially setting an exclusion for a specific URL. So, if the domain "www.demodomain.com" is seen as a broken link and it is ignored, then all of URLs on that domain are excluded from being checked. Ignoring broken links will impact your Quality Assurance Score. 

Tip: If you see lots of broken links on a site showing the same pattern, you should not ignore them individually, instead you can reach out to Siteimprove technical support to investigate.

Ignore from the broken link list

To ignore a broken link from the list of broken links:

  1. From the main menu go to Quality Assurance > Links > Broken Links.
  2. Select the checkbox to the left of the link you wish to ignore and then click the button which appears to “Ignore on all page”. (You can also use the ignore icon to the right of the broken link you wish to ignore.)

Ignore_buttons_on_the_broken_link_list_within_the_platform

Ignore from page report

To ignore a broken link from the page report

  1. Open the page report from the platform by clicking on the page title in Quality Assurance or the magnifying glass on the list of broken links.
  2. Select the broken link that you wish to ignore in the left menu.
  3. Click on the cog above the broken link to see the decision options.
  4. Select “Apply decision” to ignore the broken link on all pages.

Page_report_highlighting_the_cog_used_to_ignore_a_broken_link

How do I undo the decision to ignore a broken link?

  1. From the main menu go to Quality Assurance > Links > Ignored Links.
  2. Select the link using the checkbox on the left of the link table.
  3. Click on the button “Undo decision”.

If you have any questions regarding this, please contact Siteimprove technical support.

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