How to re-audit failed URLs

This is a short guide to show you how to use this function to help when auditing websites.

We recently moved some of our Hints content around, and there was a brief period where this resulted in some broken links on the site, which was the perfect opportunity to showcase this feature.

A straightforward audit of the site shows that we have 4 broken links after the content move:

These relate to Hints pages that were linked internally, and have now moved to new URLs, before any redirects have been set up:

Once all these redirects are in place, we could simply recrawl the site to check that everything is as we expect. And on a site this size, this would only take a couple of minutes. But imagine if you had a site with 10,000 pages, would you really want to recrawl the whole site in order to check 4 broken links?

That is where the re-audit feature comes in. In order to only re-audit the broken URLs, all we need to do is press the Re-Audit Failed URLs button on the Audit Overview.

Here's a quick gif of the process:

And again in slow motion:

This will trigger a pop-up confirming how many URLs will be re-audited. In our case we had 4 internal URLs and 1 external URLs that were Not Found, so 5 in total:

Once you click Yes to this, you will be taken to the familiar crawl progress screen, and this time only the failed URLs will be queued up and crawled.

This will complete as normal, and then it will rebuild all the reports, before finally taking you back to your completed audit.

Now when we check our internal URLs, all the 'Not Found' ones have happily disappeared. In this case, they were replaced by redirects, but that's for another guide post.

Important things to note

It may not be obvious, but this process does not result in a new audit. So in your project, you don't have 2 audits where previously you had 1 - you will still only have 1. In effect, you have replaced the old audit with this new one.

Since all the reports are rebuilt, this means that the graphs, Hints and data tables will also all be updated - including things like internal links and the Link Equity Score.

Use cases

Most of these ones will be obvious:

• If you have done some work fixing broken URLs, and want to check if you got them all.
• If your client claims to have done some work fixing broken URLs, and you want to check if they actually did anything at all!
• If you have done some work re-instating old content, and want to check if you still have any 404s.
• If your audit suffered from some timeouts or forbidden URLs, and you want to double check that they are still 'broken.'