Ever got frustrated while clicking on a link, and the page was not available? It must be an unpleasant experience when a page throws you an error. If you are a knowledge base user, having a broken link or a private URL will obviously disappoint the reader and your brand reputation will fade away. To provide a better customer experience, we must identify broken web links in your knowledge base articles. We at Document360 have launched a Link status feature recently to address this.

The basic feature of the link status is to identify the status of the links that are used in your documentation or article. The link status feature keeps your documentation updated by warning you about the non-working links or the broken links. The distinct types of link statuses that can be found in your knowledge base so far are working links, broken links, and unknown links.

And to enhance it further, we have added a new feature called Ignore URL, where you can mark a particular link as Ignore.

How it all started

The Ignore URL feature is to ignore a particular link in your knowledge base, as the name says. If you are still wondering what the use of Ignore URL is, here it is.

1. In a knowledge base, you may have many links in your documentation. It is not necessary to validate certain links found in your documentation repeatedly, as you know they are internal company links. In that case, you can move such links to Ignore URL, so that those links need not be validated.
2. You might be someone who finds it difficult every time you validate the links, even after knowing that there are a couple of links that should not be validated; this might be some private URLs or you are launching your new landing page for which the link will be LIVE only after a week. In such cases, the link might not be working, and that does not mean your link is broken, right?
3. One more interesting thing about this Ignore URL is that, once the link is ignored, you know that the link is not working currently in most cases, and the link does not show any 404 error.

And that is the exact reason we developed this feature to reduce your burden of worrying about these links, where you can just move those links to Ignore URL. It might be an internal link, or a public link but that is to be made LIVE only after a couple of days or weeks. Once you mark the links as Ignore URL, the number of Ignored links will be projected under Ignore feature in the Link status.

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Link status and Validation

This is a great benefit to all the editors and technical writers that help you to check the status of any link. You can find how the link status feature looks like in your knowledge base, below.

Validation of links

You might know how the link validation process works. There are three types of validation in the validation process as mentioned already. They are scheduled validation, manual validation, and article-level validation. The validation can be chosen based on the user’s requirements. The scheduled validation is an automated machine-level validation. The manual validation is done manually by the user with the help of Validate Project Links by clicking the button. And then there is Article level validation where you can process the validation for a particular article alone.

Once you mark the links as ignore URL, the links are moved to ignore section and the status of these links will also be mentioned as ignored. Along with this, the links will be validated only in the next validation process based on the type of validation you choose.

Ignore link – How it is done?

Once you are sure that you need to ignore a particular link, since the link is an internal one, or a link that is yet to be made LIVE, take the following steps:

1. Select Manage Ignored Links in the Link status feature and you will find two columns named Project links and Ignored.
2. Under the Project links, you will be able to find the number of links and all the unique links in the article will be displayed. The links that are to be ignored will come under the Ignored section parallel to it.

3. For example, let us consider you have a popular article posted on many sites, bookmarked by most of your customers/followers and it is updated recently including slug must be redirected. If the recent article link does not redirect properly with the previous slug, obviously it will throw you a 404 error (broken link). To ignore this, select the link to be ignored and you will see a status that says, ‘Click ignore to move selected link(s) from included to ignored status. This change would be reflected in your upcoming validation report’

4. After selecting the link using the checkbox, you will have the option called Ignore along with a small icon.

5. Click on the Ignore, and the link will be moved to Ignored status. However, the changes will be considered only after the upcoming validation.

6. After moving the links to ignore, you can do validation of your choice, and the report will show in the link status where the number of ignored links will be mentioned and the links that are ignored will be shown along with the status.

7. The same change will be reflected in all types of validation. Apart from this, you will have the single click filter; here by clicking the total link section, all the list of links will be displayed below, and you will be able to find the Ignored link at the bottom.

Include Ignored URL

In case, in the future, the link might be accessed publicly. The link that you ignored just because the landing page will go LIVE after a few weeks, might be working now. In that case, if you want to reverse the process of the Ignored links, and you want to get them back, you can do that too.

1. Under the Ignored links, you will be able to see the list of the ignored links.
2. Select the link that you want to include again.
3. Once you select the link using the checkbox, an option called Include will appear
4. You will also receive a status message saying that ‘Click include to move to selected link(s) from ignored to included status. This change would be reflected in your upcoming validation report’
5. You can select the Include option and include the link back
6. Once the link is included back, you can validate to see the updated report. And the status of the link will be changed to working.

Concluding thoughts

Link status features can help your user by giving a seamless reading experience, but Ignore URL fulfills your reader with the real user experience. Imagine not having this feature, and you know how troublesome it would be. You can save a lot of time, and cost by using this feature efficiently.

Now that you know about Ignore URL in detail, you should have known that it is equally important like any other link status feature. If you are someone who would relate to all the issues faced and still not having this amazing feature, Ignore URL, you must check our Document360 platform. Why wait when Document360 can do the job with ease? Book a demo or sign up for a free trial! Our product experts will contact you

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