Broken Bookmarks.

Bookmark analysis

In this article we’ll see how to run an audit with Screaming Frog that finds every broken bookmark on a website, analyses the source pages and bulk exports the results.

Bookmarks are a handy way to send users to a specific section of a page with one click.

Setting them up is simple: in the HTML you use the ID attribute to create the bookmark.

<h1 id=”example”>Bookmark example</h1>

Then you can link straight to the bookmark by adding a fragment (#) and the ID name (‘example’) to the page URL.

<a href=”https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/how-to-find-broken-bookmarks/#example”>See our bookmark example</a>

When the link is clicked, the page scrolls to the bookmarked position: in this case the ‘Bookmark example’ section.

Google always treats a page with several bookmarks as a single page (because it ignores anything after the “#”), but the anchors used for “jump to” links may appear in search results.

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1ResultThe page in the SERP.2Jump linksThe links to the page’s bookmarks.

Bookmark links are very popular because they take users straight to the point, but they’re also a source of many errors: they often break over time as pages are updated and IDs are changed or removed. A broken bookmark still leads to the right page (it doesn’t return a 404), but it loses its purpose.

To solve this, SEO Spider crawls URLs with “#” and checks that the matching ID exists in the page’s HTML so the bookmark works. This lets you find broken bookmark links across the whole site, simply and automatically.

• 1. Enable “Fragment identifiers”

Config > Spider > Advanced

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1Spider › AdvancedThe advanced options section.2Crawl Fragment IdentifiersMakes the spider crawl URLs with #.

• 2. Crawl the website
• 3. Click the “URL” tab and use the “Broken Bookmark” filter

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1URLThe tab dedicated to URLs.2FilterThe URL tab filter menu.3Broken BookmarkURLs with a # whose anchor isn’t found on the page.

Alternatively, you can check the metric in SEO Spider’s sidebar.

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1URLThe URL tab filtered on broken bookmarks.2Broken BookmarkThe filter in the sidebar with the number of URLs.3URL chartThe distribution of the URL tab issues.

• 4. With the data collected, see the source of the broken bookmarks in the Inlinks tab.

To see which URLs on the site link to these broken bookmarks, select a URL in the top window and check the “Inlinks” section.

This way you can fix the links or change the ID attribute on the page with the broken bookmark.

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1Selected URLThe broken bookmark to analyse.2InlinksThe pages containing the link to the bookmark.3Inlinks tabThe tab in the bottom window.

The “From” column shows the source where the broken link was placed, while “To” shows the page with the bookmark that doesn’t work.

• 5. Exporting the data

Now just bulk download the results, including both the “source” URLs and the broken bookmark pages, by highlighting every URL in the top window and right-clicking to select the “Inlinks” report.

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1Broken BookmarkThe active filter on the URL tab.2ExportThe context menu item.3InlinksExports the inbound links of the selected URLs.

Alternatively, click the “Export” button directly in the window’s “Inlinks” tab.

Bookmark analysis video

Video tutorialScreaming Frog tutorial: bookmark analysisWatch the video4:04