Monsido Training
How to find and fix broken links and other issues that affect the health and performance of your content.
Broken links, broken images, misspellings and other quality issues create a poor user experience on our site and can harm our site's health. Fixing these issues contributes to increased visibility, visits and engagement on your pages.
This training will show how to use Monsido to find your broken links and other quality signals on pages. The recording is approximately 30 min long and is recommended for all site group managers to learn to monitor links across your section.
Common Questions About Monsido
Monsido Issues
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Some of our components don't have an alt text field, such as the C12 in-page navigation component. This is because these images are always decorative. Alt text is not required on images that are purely decorative, but Monsido doesn't know when an image is used decoratively. It's safe to ignore these flags!
You can also edit the image directly in the DAM: the title field in the image properties is what most programs use for alt text if it's not independently authored. Follow usual alt text guidance if you do this: describe the image as if to someone on the phone and end in a period.
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Sometimes Monsido will incorrectly identify a link as broken. Always double check before changing or removing a link to be safe. This might happen because the linked page took too long to load while Monsido was checking that page that week. If it's not really broken, you can mark it as fixed to see if the issue goes away, or mark it as ignore to remove it from your reporting permanently.
This is a frequent issue with Vimeo links. Monsido has a hard time reading Vimeo links. If you know for sure that a Vimeo link is not broken you can safely tell Monsido to ignore it.
It's best to use YouTube for all videos so we can get the full analytics on our video interactions, but also because Monsido can better tell when YouTube links are legitimately broken.
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Let me know! Send your question via the marketing request portal.
Using Monsido
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Anyone who manages a page or pages on one of TNC's web properties should have access to Monsido. Site group managers should also receive a weekly email from Monsido detailing issues discovered within that section. Typically, this will include all authors and publishers, but can also include other stakeholders.
Multiple people with ownership can have individual Monsido accounts, as we have no account limit.
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Pages that are long, use tabs, or have a lot of links can take a while to find a single broken link to fix. While you could scroll through a page and manually check links (hover over them on Chrome desktop to see the full URL in the bottom left corner), here are two faster ways:
- Check My Links extension: This Chrome extension allows you to quickly and easily identify broken and redirecting links on any page. Broken links will be highlighted in red, while redirecting links will be highlighted in a lime green. Both types of links should be updated.
- View page source: You can quickly find the broken link by opening the source code. Right click on the page and select View Page Source to open up a new tab with the page's code. Then search (control or command + F) for the individual broken link and see where it is on the page. You should be able to read basic html before trying this to understand which component has the broken link. This method is great if there was a link added in page properties or another component where links are not immediately visible.
The Monsido browser extension will also show you exactly where on a page to find a broken link or image.
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Yes, Monsido has multiple dictionaries for multi-lingual uses and we included the Monsido program on all AEM domains.
However, Monsido may flag certain words as being misspelled, even though they are not. This is common when pages copied from one type of English to another (such as American English to Australian or British). Proper nouns are also often flagged as misspelled, especially last names, local places, and species names.
Add common words to your dictionary to prevent them from being flagged as misspelled on other pages. If a word is incorrectly flagged as misspelled on your page, but it could be considered a misspelling on other pages, you can tell Monsido to ignore it on your pages. This will remove the flag from your account but keep it for others.
Find misspellings by navigating to Quality Assurance (top navigation tab) > Spellcheck (left side menu) > Misspellings (left side menu).
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Both the Monsido browser extension and the online interface offer valuable information. You can use whichever one is easier for you!
Some people prefer the extension because it automatically loads on every page and they can see if there are QA issues on a page they're getting ready to update. It's ideal for a quick look at an individual page.
The online interface has more functionality, such as exporting, and is much more helpful for reviewing a site group as a whole.
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No, which pages Monsido designates as a priority comes from the platform and can't be edited. The priority level is a combination of the number of issues on a page and its estimated page views. It does not mean that a page Monsido marks as a priority to fix will always be the same as your priority pages.
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Broken links offer a poor user experience for your visitors and reduce the health of our site. It's up to you and the unique circumstances of the page and link whether you'd like to replace a broken link with a different link or remove it entirely.
If you want to replace it, you can:
- Search on the website for the new version of the page. It may have been moved and not redirected, and could be very easy to find.
- Search other websites or Google for an appropriate alternative. Be sure to link to authoritative websites! Other partner organizations and internal links are always a good fit.
Otherwise, feel free to remove the link and modify the sentence if necessary.
Other Monsido Features
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Readability is a score that identifies the reading level of our written content. Most of our content is written at a college reading level, meaning those with a college degree are most able to easily understand our articles, and those with a lower reading level may have a more difficult time.
Content with an advanced reading level can result in lower scroll depth and engagement, even among audiences that should have that level of education. To be most inclusive, content should target a high school reading level. This means that more people will have an easier time reading and comprehending the information we want to share. This is especially important for pages that are meant to reach the general public.
A lower readability level doesn't mean you can't communicate complex scientific subjects! It only means you should structure these pages to be more accessible to all audiences. Even academically advanced audiences will appreciate when complex subjects are communicated clearly.
Some simple ways to do this are by reducing the lengh of both sentences and paragraphs to improve the flow, briefly defining scientific words and phrases, elimintating jargon, and adding descriptive headers.
Other resources to improve content for digital audiences:
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Monsido sends a weekly list of pages that received zero visits in the last month. You can request to get this list for just the pages in your site group section.
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Monsido will identify any misspelled words across your pages. It will also identify any that might be misspelled, which are often proper nouns (especially people and place names) and often scientific species names.
Any definite misspellings should be corrected across your pages.
Any potential misspellings should be reviewed. To correct these, you can either add the word to the dictionary (which will add it to the dictionary for all TNC websites) or ignore on an individual page. Scientific species names, people's names, and place names that are being flagged as a potential misspelling can be added to the dictionary to remove this flag from all our reports.
Find potential misspellings by navigating to Quality Assurance (top navigation tab) > Spellcheck (left side menu) > Potential Misspellings (left side menu).
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Monsido allows us to create custom content policies to find other QA errors specific to our domains. For example, since we follow AP style, if might be helpful to flag specific errors with this style of writing. Or it could be used to find outdated phrases in our style guides, such as "The Conservancy".
If you'd like to set up a content policy, please submit a request and we can explore the possibilities!
Improve your site health
Links on TNC Properties
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What You Need to Know About SEO
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How to Audit a Site Group
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