Broken Link Manager: How to Resolve False Negatives
- Cognillo Content Admin
- Jawad Haider (Unlicensed)
- Kristine Hosmillo
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This article will help you with resolving issues where the Broken Link Manager reports status of links incorrectly, such as a link is valid but the tool reports them as broken.
Introduction
False negatives: If you have links that are reported as broken (such as HTTP Status Code 404) but when you open the site in Internet Explorer or other web browser and the web page loads correctly, there may be a few causes.
Causes
Be sure to set up the correct authentication. In some cases you will need to change from Office 365 or Default SharePoint Authentication to use ‘Web Browser Authentication’. Look for errors in the log files that relate to unauthorized, which means you may have a federated environment or single sign on, which require Web Browser Authentication to connect. See the User Manual for more information about Authentication Types.
Make sure you have added the SharePoint environment to the Internet Options “Trusted Sites”.
Check the network traffic using tools such as Fiddler, we have found some pages may be incorrectly being resolved and redirected and reporting a 404 first and then redirects to a valid page. This may be an issue with DNS or the HTTP redirect code being used. We are working on providing a more descriptive status code for these situations to help identify these issues of page URL resolution/redirects.
See below for example of this using Fiddler: (Click to enlarge)
