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Scanning Links

After installing the plugin, you need to scan all posts to find links and their details. It's required to create reports in the plugin dashboard.

To scan links, clink the Scan links now button:

Start scan links in Slim SEO Pro

After that, the plugin will refresh and show you the current status of the link-scanning process:

Link scanning process status

When the link scanning process finishes, the status (admin notice) will disappear and you'll see reports in the plugin dashboard.

Link reports

How it works​

Slim SEO Pro scans links in the background to avoid any performance issues if you have a lot of posts. The plugin uses WordPress cron to process posts and parse links from the post content. So in each run, the plugin will process only a batch of posts and parse links for them. This will reduce the performance impact on your hosting/server as the number of posts for each run is relatively small and can be processed at once. Even if the plugin fails at processing some posts, it will try again in the next run.

Because the plugin depends on the WordPress cron, it requires the cron to work. If you disable WordPress cron and use an external cron (like a server cron or a remote system that sends requests to your site to trigger the cron), then the scanner runs only when the cron is called. If your cron setup is once per 15 minutes, then the plugin runs its background processing once every 15 minutes, which might take more time than usual to finish the process.

In that case, we'd recommend enable the WordPress cron to run the scanner once and then disable the WordPress cron when you finish.

In case you already ran the link scanning, and you want to scan again, go to the Tools tab and you'll find the Scan links button there:

Run the scan links tool again

caution

The link scanning action will remove all existing link data and scans from the beginning.

Troubleshooting​

Requests blocked​

If you use a security plugin or a security rule in CloudFlare, there might be a chance that the requests made by the plugin are blocked. Technically, the plugin uses background processing to send requests to admin-ajax.php via the wp_remote_post function to perform the scan. If your security rules have a max request limit, then they might block the requests, even when the requests are made by the server itself.

In this case, you might want to increase the limit or exclude the server IP of the website to avoid blocking the plugin's requests.

For the Shield Security plugin, please go to the plugin settings > Config tab > Traffic, and update the settings Max Request Limit and Request Limit Time Interval.

If you use CloudFlare WAF's Rate Limiting Rules, then increase the limit in its settings.

Scanning process not finishing​

If you see the scanning process isn't finished, please follow these steps:

  • Update Slim SEO Pro to the latest version.
  • Deactivate the plugin and reactivate it.
  • Re-scan links

When deactivating the plugin, your data remains. No links are lost or changed.

After scanning links, let's discover the reports.

Dynamic links are, by nature, always changing. For example, if you have a "Recent Posts" widget or a section that automatically lists your latest articles, every time you publish a new post:

  • New links appear
  • Older links disappear
  • The order may change

Because these links update themselves over time, the list is never stable. That makes it extremely difficult (and often not very useful) to track them reliably. The report can quickly become noisy or misleading.

Besides, Slim SEO stores all detected links in a dedicated database table and regularly runs background checks to verify their status.

However, with dynamically generated links, this process becomes inefficient:

  • The plugin would have to rescan your site constantly to catch every change.
  • This would impact performance, especially on larger sites.
  • The database could grow very large because these links change frequently and are not meant to be stored long-term.

To keep your website fast and your reports clean, Slim SEO avoids analyzing links that are generated dynamically. We only analyze static linksβ€”the links that appear directly in your post or page content and do not change unless you edit the content yourself. These are predictable, stable, and meaningful for SEO analysis.