Problem

You have put in some long hours creating valuable content for your visitors, you then publish your content only to discover that there are broken links preventing those visitors (potential customers) from seeing your content. All your hard work is for naught.

A link is considered broken when, an internally linked asset/page is invalid or when the external server does not respond in time, returns a moved-permanently status code or an HTTP code of 400 or higher. Broken links are harmful in two ways

They make for a bad user experience – When users click on links and reach dead-end 404 errors, they get frustrated and may never return.
They devalue your SEO efforts – Broken links restrict the flow of link equity throughout your site, which affects rankings negatively.

In the world of AEM, we are provided with an OOTB link checker service which validates all the links within each given content page as it is rendered. There are some limitations that we need to be mindful of:

In Author Instance, when enabled, it marks the invalid link with a broken link icon, which indicates to the author that a particular link is broken.
On Publish instance, if the service is running, it completely removes the link from the page and the link appears as a text only.
In AEM, there is no consolidated view available for checking all broken links in all locations.
Currently, authors must go to each content page individually, check for broken links, and then fix them. This manual process makes it a very tedious and inefficient job.
Link Checker when enabled on Publish, it removes the broken links, so we end up losing sharing relevant information with authors.
Using this tool, it will be Super easy to visually view as well fix all the broken links in the content structure, which in turn will resolve all the above issues

More over the report/view we can see in AEM does not help user/admin to know the broken link and identify the usage of the broken link(s) across the content like the following view

Identify and Fix Broken Links – AEM Link Checker

Solution

TA Digital Inc. has built an enhanced link checker tool to give us a report style view of all broken links across the entire content structure, AND provides a way to fix the internal or external links directly within that reporting tool.

Features include :

User Friendly Tree Format View

Allows Author/Admin view all the broken links in the AEM Instance in a very user-friendly tree structure format.

View List of All Pages where each Broken Link is Present

For each Broken Link, it provides a List of all the Pages (as links) where the respective broken link has been authored so that the author/admin can directly navigate to that page right from the tool and can edit the links in real-time.

Fix Broken Links from within the Tool
Export Report to Excel

Screenshots:

MainView:

Identify and Fix Broken Links – AEM Link Checker

Internal Links:

When the link is clicked, a modal popup is displayed allowing the user to fix the internal broken links. On First Tab, an incorrect URL can be modified to a correct URL, and then the author can click “Fix Broken Links” button which will crawl the content and fix all instances of that same broken link across all content. No need to manually browse from page to page and fix each link individually.

Identify and Fix Broken Links – AEM Link Checker

Internal Links (New Page):

Clicking on the second tab allows the user to create a new page based on an existing template as a placeholder. The new page URL value will replace wrong URL across the content.

Identify and Fix Broken Links – AEM Link Checker

External Links:

External broken links can be similarly fixed by adding the correct URL and then applying that change across all instances of that broken link in the content structure. If the author is unsure of which external URL to use, the 5 most likely external URLs are provided as suggestions, removing some of the guesswork.

Identify and Fix Broken Links – AEM Link Checker

Explore Additional Resources

Check out our TA Link Checker which allows you to fix internal and external links for Adobe Experience Manager.

If you’d like to learn more about Adobe Experience Manager, visit our Adobe Practice.

Get Help from Our Experts

Over the past 20 years, we have completed thousands of digital projects globally. We have one of the largest and deepest multi-solutions digital consulting teams in the world. Our proprietary processes and years of Digital Experience expertise have earned us a 97% customer satisfaction rating with our clients ranging from Global Fortune 1000 to Mid-Market Enterprises, leading educational institutions, and Non-Profits.

DesignRush has recognized TA Digital as a top Creative Agency.

About TA Digital

TA Digital is the only global boutique agency that delivers the “best of both worlds” to clients seeking to achieve organizational success through digital transformation. Unlike smaller, regional agencies that lack the ability to scale or large organizations that succumb to a quantity-over-quality approach, we offer resource diversity while also providing meticulous attention to the details that enable strategic success.

Over the past 20 years, TA Digital has positioned clients to achieve digital maturity by focusing on data, customer-centricity, and exponential return on investment; by melding exceptional user experience and data-driven methodologies with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we enable digital transformations that intelligently build upon the strategies we set into motion. We are known as a global leader that assists marketing and technology executives in understanding the digital ecosystem while identifying cultural and operational gaps within their business – ultimately ushering organizations toward a more mature model and profitable digital landscape.

Recognized in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, TA Digital is pleased also to share high-level strategic partnerships with world class digital experience platform companies like Adobe, SAP, Acquia, commercetools, Sitecore, and Elastic Path.