Broken Link Ignoring - Should I?

A trusted account administrator level user can save all of their DubBot users a lot of time by adding the frequently-used external URLs in your account to the list of Links to Ignore as you are setting up your DubBot account.

Some URLs to consider:

After your first site crawls, you may encounter a large number of issues being flagged as broken links. The following discusses some options to filter this data.

When a link is categorized as broken, DubBot logs the reason, or status code, given when the link was flagged. Review our Broken Link Status Codes article for information on these codes and which codes are currently enabled by default.

Users with appropriate permissions can ignore, or disallow, link check reasons from being reported at either the site or account level.

Pros: Ignoring a Link Check Reason, for example, HTTP_403: Forbidden, can very quickly reduce the number of broken links reported on a site, or even across an account.

Cons: Ignoring this check reason will mean that broken links that have that code will not be reported at all for the site or account where it is disabled. While that is the point of allowing the disabling of a Link Check Reason, this is one of the decisions that truly depends on your unique situation and needs to be made by site administrators.

Consider this: If the content creators across your account have a bad habit of linking to a particular site that returns a 403 error code, and they should not be linking to the resource at all, you would not want to disable the 403 error codes.

Conversely: If your content creators across your account link to your intranet that returns a HTTP_403 error, you may decide this is acceptable in your situation and you aren't concerned about them linking to other similar sites, so disabling the reporting on the HTTP_403 check reason would be fine for your account or site.

In the first situation described above, where the HTTP_403 errors continue to be reported, initially there are normally a good number of broken links that have to be gone through and ignored. However, the end result could be worth it if the continual reporting of 403 errors is important in your situation.

If you don't want to exclude links by Link Check Reason, you can also choose to Exclude Broken Link Checking by URL using a simple URL or using a regular expression for more complicated URL patterns.