Sonoma State University

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Siteimprove - How to Find and Repair Links to web.sonoma.edu

SSU's legacy web platform (web.sonoma.edu) has been decommissioned, effective June 5, 2022. All links that point to URLs starting https://web.sonoma.edu or https://web.sonoma.edu are broken, and we recommend that content authors update them as soon as possible. Broken links negatively affect our site visitors, as well as our sites' Google search results - the more broken links your site has, the lower Google ranks all of your pages.

Content authors can use Siteimprove to identify where these links are so they can be corrected.  If you don't have access to Siteimprove, see Siteimprove - How do I gain access for my website?

Note: These instructions are specific to SSU Drupal sites, but a similar process can be used for other sonoma.edu sites that are on other content management systems.  If you have questions, contact the IT Help Desk.

Instructions

  1. Login to your Drupal site.
  2. In a new tab, login to Siteimprove. Use the SSO login screen with your Seawolf username and password.
  3. Pull down the Groups select menu and choose your site.
  4. Make sure you are in the Dashboard "Accessibility and Quality Assurance".
  5. Scroll toward the bottom, and find the widget labeled "Policies with the most matches".
  6. Click on "Links to SSU's Legacy Webserver - Needs to be updated"
    • If you don't see that policy listed, click "View whole list of your policies" and then look for the link.
  7. On the Policy Details page, you'll see a chart showing the number of matches found over last 6 months, and a table listing all the pages that have links to URLs using web.sonoma.edu. Click on a page in the list. This opens the page report in the Policy view.  The Policy view cannot identify and outline the relevant portion of the page in the Content view.
  8. Click the Show HTML button.
  9. The relevant link in the HTML will be highlighted and underlined.  Read the full URL and nearby text to identify the content and link that must be updated.
    • Note: some pages will have more than one occurrence of a web.sonoma.edu URL.  Look for the Occurrences button in the upper right area of the HTML view to switch to other occurrences.
  10. Click the page's link at the top of the Siteimprove page report to go to the page in Drupal to make repairs.
  11. Click New Draft.
  12. In the HTML editor, find the link that needs to be fixed.
  13. Click the a tag in the tag selector area.
  14. Click Remove Link.
  15. Following the instructions "Drupal - How to Make a Link", create a correct link to the page or file.
    • If the link is to something on the same Drupal site, use the Link to Content button. This will make a relative link using the resource's Drupal ID number.  Drupal automatically converts this to a human-friendly URL.  Added benefit: if the page's path ever changes (if the page is moved in the menu or renamed), Drupal will update the human-friendly URL, preventing the link from breaking.
    • If the link is to a different site, find the live site and resource, and copy the link from the browser's URL field.  Then use the Link button to make the link.
    • If the web.sonoma.edu URL is being used for an image, click the Add image button to select the image.  If the image doesn't exist on your production Drupal site, you will need to upload the image from your computer, or replace the image with a different one.

Questions?

Contact IT Help Desk,  or submit a Drupal/Website service request ticket.