This week, Support Lead, Helen Grimbly outlines the 'Linking details' section of the Inventory of an assessment.

The Inventory 'Linking details' section of an Report displays all links found from an assessed website to other external sites, highlighting which ones have issues. It is useful to know if any sites you are linking to are not working. Previous Reports can be checked to see if this is a recuring issue or temporary so that you can decide whether the link needs to be reviewed and potentially be updated or removed. Linking details can also be useful to help find out what digital properties you own.

Issues are highlighted with 'dots' next to them - green is OK, orange is warning and red means issues are found. Links next to the dots can be selected for more information, and from that page there may also be a 'view details' link to view an associated diagnostic.

Issues could be for example: 

• url/fetch/moved - Resource has moved permanently (to '<destination link name>'), links should be updated 
• url/fetch/unknownstatus - Unknown status code 308 received ('Permanent Redirect') 
• url/fetch/nolocation - 301 redirect code received but no Location header given

Potential Actions

If the external link is within your owned digital properties, a link should ideally be updated to its new location, for example, depending what the issue is.

Where it is not possible to update a link because it is externally owned, and the link is required to remain for archive reasons you could mark the link as archived, so it is not assessed by Sitemorse. Please see the following article:https://sitemorse.com/blog-article/9392/tech-update-archiving-old-content-cannot-be-updated/ 

If a link is not archived and you need to retain it, you can request that we add a custom exclusion not to assess the link, but note this will not apply to INDEX Reports. If we do this then of course we will no longer be able to indicate problems with the link that may affect site visitors.

Categories in Linking details

The categories are as follows (where example.org is your assessed site domain):

• Links to Phishing, Malware and Unwanted Software site 
• Links containing banned brand keywords 
• Links to staging servers 
• Sub domains of 'example.org' 
• Matching 'example' (domains containing the text 'example') 
• All other site dependencies 
• <A section for each domain name found on your assessed site>