Link Health
Link Health checks your links and images for you, so you hear about a dead link before your listeners do. It’s part of the Outlinks add-on and covers your whole site: tracked links, and the external links and images in your episodes, pages and posts.
What Gets Checked
Every week, or every day if you choose (see Schedule and Email Digest), Benecaster checks:
- Every tracked link — the reference’s URL, the affiliate URL, and each country rule’s addresses.
- Every external link and image in your published episodes (show notes and podcatcher description), pages and posts.
It covers every show, including shows where Outlinks is switched off, because their /go/ links still send visitors on.
Some things are not checked:
- Drafts, scheduled and private content. Only published content is scanned.
- Links to your own site. A link counts as external when it points to another site; a subdomain such as
shop.yoursite.comcounts as external. - An expired link’s fallback URL. Once a link has expired it reads Expired, whatever its addresses answer.
- Anything you exclude. See Exclusions.
Link Health follows redirects and judges where they land, so a link that redirects to a missing page is broken. A shop’s bot protection sometimes answers checks with a refusal (status 401, 403 or 429), which Amazon and sites behind Cloudflare often do. Those links are recorded with their status but not counted as broken, since a person clicking them gets through.
Link Health runs while Outlinks is switched on for at least one show on your site.
Where to Find It
Benecaster → Settings → Link Health. It’s one page for your whole site, with no show selector. The entry appears while Outlinks is switched on for at least one show.
Each show’s Settings → Outlinks tab also shows a summary line, such as 3 broken links or images site-wide, with a → Link Health link, and a status on each tracked link.
The List
The page opens on broken items. Each item appears once, with tracked links listed first.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| URL | The address checked. A tracked link shows its /go/ address underneath. |
| Found in | Tracked link, Episode, Page or Post, with the post’s title linked to its editor |
| Show | The episode’s or tracked link’s show; — for pages and posts |
| Type | Link or Image |
| Status | See Statuses |
| First detected | When Link Health first found the item: the first scan that saw it, or when a tracked link was created. It is not when the item started failing. |
| Failures | How many checks in a row have found it broken |
| Actions | What you can do with it. See Fixing an Item. |
Narrow the list with the filters above it:
- Source — All sources, Tracked links, Episodes, Pages or Posts.
- Show — one show’s episodes and tracked links. Pages and posts have no show.
- Status — any one status, or All statuses.
- Show dismissed — lists the items you’ve dismissed, instead of the rest.
The list shows 50 items a page; use Previous and Next to move through it.
Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Broken | No answer, or an error such as Broken (404). For a tracked link, at least one of its current addresses is broken. |
| Redirected | A link or image that redirects somewhere working, such as Redirected (301). Worth updating, but not broken. Tracked links never show this; they’re judged by where the redirect lands. |
| Expired | A tracked link past its expiry date. |
| Unchecked | Not checked yet, such as a new item, a new tracked link, one whose address you’ve just changed, or one carried over when you moved an episode. It gets a real status at the next check. |
| Excluded | A tracked link whose every address is on a domain you’ve excluded. |
| Healthy | Checked and working. |
Fixing a tracked link’s address takes it from Broken to Unchecked straight away, without waiting for the next check.
Fixing an Item
Use the buttons in a row’s Actions column, or tick several rows and use the bar that appears above the list (N selected). Each item reports its own result, and a failure shows beside its row, so one problem never stops the rest.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Dismiss | Takes the item off the list and out of the broken counts. It’s still checked. Find it again with Show dismissed, and click Restore to bring it back. |
| Update URL | Enter a New URL and click Save URL. Every link or image with that address in the post is changed. |
| Unlink | Removes the link from the post and keeps its text. For links only, not images. |
| Create outlink | Turns a link in an episode into a tracked link. Enter a Link name and click Create link. The link in the episode then points at its new /go/ address, so its clicks are counted. One at a time, and only in episodes on a show with Outlinks switched on. |
Update URL, Unlink and Create outlink edit the post itself, in the same way as editing it by hand. WordPress keeps a revision, so you can undo a change from the post’s revisions. You need permission to edit that post. If the link has already gone from the post, Link Health says so, and the item leaves the list at the next scan.
A converted link leaves the list of links at the next scan and is watched from then on as a tracked link. It depends on Outlinks being installed, like any /go/ link.
A tracked link can only be dismissed here. To fix one, change the reference’s URL in the episode editor, or its affiliate or country addresses in the link’s settings. See The Link’s Settings.
A link dismissed here still shows its real status on the show’s Outlinks tab.
Exclusions
Some links are never worth checking: a shop that always blocks checks, or a category of old posts you don’t maintain. The Exclusions section below the list sets what Link Health skips:
- Domains — one per line. A domain covers its subdomains:
amazon.comalso leaves outwww.amazon.comandsmile.amazon.com, but notamazon.co.uk. - Leave out — Episodes, Pages or Posts.
- Categories — WordPress post categories and Benecaster’s episode categories, marked (episodes).
Click Save exclusions. Anything now covered leaves the list straight away. If you remove an exclusion, its items come back at the next check.
Excluding a domain also stops checking your tracked links’ addresses on that domain. Exclude amazon.com and your Amazon affiliate URLs aren’t checked either, and a tracked link whose every address is excluded reads Excluded.
Schedule and Email Digest
The Schedule section sets how often Link Health runs and emails you:
- Check links — Weekly (the default) or Daily.
- Email digest — Weekly (the default), Daily or Off.
Click Save schedule.
The digest goes to the Administration Email Address under Settings → General in WordPress. Its subject reads Link Health: N newly broken links or images on {your site}. It lists each newly broken tracked link with where it goes, and each broken link or image with its post (linked to the editor) and the error, up to 50 items, then the total broken now.
A digest goes only when something new has broken since the last one. A week with nothing new sends no email. A daily digest needs daily checks to go out daily.
The Link Health Notice
When a check finds anything broken, a Link Health warning appears in the notification bell: Link Health found N broken links or images on your site. Click Open Link Health to go to the page. The warning goes away when nothing is broken.
Dismissed and excluded items aren’t counted. If you dismiss the warning, it comes back only when something new breaks.
The warning is updated at the end of each check, so a fix, dismissal or exclusion shows in its count after the next one. The summary line on each show’s Outlinks tab updates straight away. See Notifications.
For Developers
benecaster_outlinks_health_check_completed— runs once each check finishesbenecaster_outlinks_health_notice_message— changes the warning’s textbenecaster_outlinks_health_digest_subjectandbenecaster_outlinks_health_digest_body— change the digest emailbenecaster_outlinks_health_item_action_before/_after— around each Dismiss, Restore, Update URL, Unlink or Create outlinkbenecaster_outlinks_health_settings_save_before/_after— around saving the schedulebenecaster_outlinks_health_exclusions_save_before/_after— around saving exclusions
Code examples are in the recipe library.
See Also
Need this built rather than just documented? See our services →
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