Is there a way to view which articles are linked to other articles within Zendesk? I really dislike removing an article to later find out that it was referenced by several articles, which now have broken URL references.
Managing Links
Hey Mark!
To the best of my knowledge there isn't a way to manage this within Guide itself, but I pinged Jennifer, our Documentation Manager, to get some insight into how we manage this kind of thing on our end! Hopefully some other folks here in the Community will be able to share some suggestions as well.
Hi Mark,
Jessie's right--there's not built-in functionality. But if you have Google Analytics set up for your Help Center, then you find broken links that way.
Check out this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203664166
Hope that helps!
it appear like Mark is more referring to a semantic network
and Jennifers post answers the broken link question . On the first glance it seems to be only a solution for internal broken link (within the knowledge base).
I wonder if there's an update or third party tool you could recommend?
I'm about to try creating an enormous excel for this and it's such a wrong way to do it lol
Hi Ruthy -
We don't have any updates, but hopefully other users will be able to suggest some tools to help you out! That DOES sound like a monster spreadsheet. 0_o
@Ruthy Licht - yikes! that sounds like a pain. I think it's doable to generate a report by using the Help Center API.
If you have access to a developer who can spend a few minutes writing a script, they could probably just search through articles for hyperlinks that start with your subdomain (i.e. https://help.yourcompany.com or https://yourcompany.zendesk.com).
Thank you so much @Au Finh Saechao!
Will definitely ask someone to take a look.
This is a great idea!
@Au Finh Saechao
Sorry to trouble you again - can you possibly direct me to the part of the docs here about accessing the html content of each article?
I can only find this: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/help_center/articles which only shows access to list the article objects, not iterate over content inside the articles...
I probably just don't know to recognize this. Any help much appreciated!
@Ruthy Licht sorry for the delayed response!
To access the html content, you can search in the body field. We actually have a prototype app to test this out. Would love to give you a demo if you’re interested.
@Au Finh Saechao I know this response was from ages ago, but I would love to find out more if you still have an app to do this. It's crazy that there's no functionality for this within Zendesk!
Sarah S, glad to hear there's still interest in the app. We were in the process of polishing up the app for the marketplace but put it on the back burner after realizing the feature set was too small for it to be a paid/supported app. However, we're open to possibly making it a free app. Did you have any other specific requirements or use cases in mind besides being able to view articles that are linked to other articles?
@Au Finh Saechao We have two use cases where this may help us:
1. I would like to view all the times a URL is used in the body of any article as we are pushing content from a single-source publishing tool now, which creates a new URL. If I'm pushing a page from the single-source publishing tool that will replace the one I had in Zendesk already I need to update all of the URLs to the new one, and I have no way to find where I've used the old URL.
2. We are also making a large portion of our Zendesk guide public-facing where it was previously all sign-in only. Some pages will remain sign-in only, so I want to add a notation to those URLs to explain that (i.e., "this article requires login"). Finding places where I've linked URLs for articles I plan to keep as sign-in only is a challenge.
I actually have a few other ways I think I could use it not around URLs as well.
Thanks!
Sarah S. This is very helpful! Thank you for sharing. When we get the opportunity to work on the app again, hopefully sometime later this year, I'll be sure to post updates here.
Please help. There must be a way round being able to check if links are broken.
The suggestion to use Google Analytics only "gives you every instance of a customer getting the error message." That is too late!
There surely must be some way to check that a link does not refer to either an archived article or an article that is draft.What does everyone else do who has their knowledge center in Zendesk? Check every link manually or just keep their fingers crossed?
I also would love a way to find all articles that contain certain links to other articles. My company's software is always changing (like most software) so of course new articles are created, old ones are removed, links need to be updated. Right now, I'm opening each article to check links.
I'm disappointed that Zendesk got as far as "polishing up the app" just to drop it.
Is there an easy way to download all articles locally so I can use a separate search tool on the downloaded files?
Nicole. I have the same problem. I manually check links and I spend hours on this!
If you find a way to download all articles please let us all know.
Each article would need to be created as individual files with a name the same as the link. It is all HTML so this shouId be possible (although the Href links are not added to Zendesk in a consistent way).
@Nicole Gogel Sorry. I should clarify that we're a third party developer and can't speak for Zendesk. We'll definitely try our best to work on this sooner though!
As for Zendesk's side of things, I encourage you all to post in the Feedback on Guide community topic, so that the product manages receive your feedback.
If you haven't posted there before, here are guidelines on how to write an effective feedback post
In case anyone is still struggling, I have found a good Link checker Xenu’s Link Sleuth https://xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com/ (and it's free)
It ran over the whole site which has hundreds of pages. You can config it to exclude pages starting with certain text (I had to ignore all the twitter facebook and linked in links that came up on our help) and you can export the results into excel to easily filter out results, sort etc etc.
Still checking and it looks like it doesn't find links to articles that are in draft. But it does find links to archived articles.
SharePoint has this built-in on their Wiki pages - so every time you want to archive or delete a page you just click "Incoming Links" and you see every (internal) link you need to update before archiving. This doesn't address incoming links from external sources but it's great for article-to-article links. We really need this functionality for Guide!
Hi everybody,
I am working on an app that enables you to export a list articles and all the links within each article in Zendesk Guide. The broken links & images are automatically detected and highlighted in the export.
It will be released soon, at no cost for all the requests coming from this thread.
You can register for early access here.
@Sorin Alupoaie I would be interested in the early access, this sounds great!
Thank you!
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@Aaron thanks for providing that Product Feedback link!
It looks like you've already added your feedback to that post for our Product Feedback Managers to view. While this isn't currently a feature, this helps give us a better understanding of what our customers are looking for which we greatly appreciate :)
Thanks again!