Easily Find Posts with Broken Shrinked URLs

A few days ago I was told that one of my shrinked URL wasn’t linking to the site it should be. The shortening URL service was d95.com. About a month ago, I was aware that d95.com discontinued its service due to high spamming and abuses. My direct response was testing some URLs I shrinked using d95.com and found out that they were working as usual. So, there’s nothing to worry about…

…until a few days ago, I had my content on one of my social network accounts deleted due to improper linking to an adult dating site. I was surprised knowing that I haven’t changed anything in my profile for the last weeks. So I decided to send a clarification message asking what content got deleted. The reply I received then mentioned that the link pointing to the adult dating service was one of my d95.com links.

BAD BOY! It turns out that d95.com has discontinued their service and sell the domain. All links shortened with d95.com are now directed to a web page like this:

Formerly a URL service – d95.com

To be honest, I and I guess all who are using their service not for spamming purposes are very dissapointed with their decision to take down the service and provide no solution to the circumstance. One problem that will surely make the users busy is altering the shortened URL into the original URL or another link that works. But how are we going to find out where we have put the shrinked links? Is there any way to locate them and replace them quickly?

For the links you put in your blog posts, one of the solutions I use is using the PHPMyAdmin in my hosting account CPanel. This tool allows you to search directly into your blog’s database for posts containing the word “d95.com”. Here’s where you can find the PHPMyAdmin assuming your CPanel is similar to mine.

you can find the link in the “Database” section

*Disclaimer: Please do this tutorial at your own risk. I have practised the tutorial myself for many times and have had no problems. Even so, I’m unable to be held responsible for any errors or malfunctions occured in your blog or database while performing these steps.

Click the link and the next thing to do is choosing your blog’s database from the list on the left panel. That will bring up the tables contained in the database.

To locate the desired phrase – in this case d95.com – , click the “Search” tab as shown in the picture below.

The link leads to a form where you can enter your search keyword, your search rules and specify which tables you’re going to search in. To find all posts containing shrinked URLs using the deceased d95.com service, my search query looks like this:

Click on the image to enlarge. Notice that I highlight the table “wp-posts” to find the phrase d95.com inside my articles. Press “GO”.

You can then see how many results are found above the search form. I have 19..

Click on the “Browse” button to see what posts they are and you will see a table with columns such as ID, post_author, post_date… etc.

Take a look at the “post_name” column. The content might be look like this:

Among the regular slugs we usually see to direct users to our individual articles, there are slugs we barely ever see. The phrases we need to change are the ones in the regular slug forms. In my example above, they are in the “web-hosting-tips-which-web-hosting-service-fits-me” kind of slugs rather than “548-autosave”. To group the regular slugs and make the selection easier, click on the columns name (post_name).

Then, watch for the record having the regular slug and click on the pencil icon to edit the content. You may want to edit the post in a new tab. You’ll know why at the end of the article.

Inside the record, there’s a field named “post_content”. There’s the body of your article is stored. It’s in HTML format, by the way..

What I do next is locating where the keyword I’m looking for (d95.com) is. I use Firefox’s search function and here’s how mine looks:

click to enlarge

Replace the link and when you’re done, go to the bottom of the page and save your modification. You will be directed to a table which shows all your posts. So if you edited in a new tab, you can refresh the tab where you clicked the pencil icon and refresh button above the tables. You can see that the number of records containing the phrase you want to change is reduced. This means your modification was successfully saved.

For further checking, view your blog and head to the post you modified earlier. In my case, the link should not point to d95.com anymore and so should yours .

Any problems? Feel free to ask them in the comments.

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