I’m using a link checker plugin on this blog, but I’ve noticed lately that about half of the external links are marked as broken. (The plugin marks those links with a line through the text like shown above.) But when I click on the links, they work perfectly.
So I just had a peek at the plugin’s dashboard:
And virtually all of the “broken” links are “403 Forbidden”, so my immediate thought was: “OK, all these sites probably use Cloudflare, and Cloudflare has (by default) paranoid anti “bot” settings.”
Right again! Indeed, the vast majority of these 403s are from Cloudflare.
And it’s because the link checker bot fails the “are you human?” captcha.
Some of the 403s are from Cloudfront, and some are from Akamai (the two other big reverse proxy services), though.
But… I guess that this means that the days where you could automatically check whether links still work are over? So I should just disable the plugin?
*sigh* I guess so.