Tens of thousands of verified links vanished

davbel

@Sven have you changed the way SER verifies links in the last update?

Ran the update last night and when I logged on to my server this AM, 10s of 1000's of verified links have gone from all of the campaigns where I reverify links.

From what I can it isn't platform specific although it does seem that lots of the articles are no longer verified in every project e.g.

I have some spam test projects that had 1000s of verified links that are now in the 100s
Most of my slowly slowly projects that had hundreds of verified now are less than 100

I understand links vanish over time, but I must have lost about 80% overnight.

I've checked some sites in Ahrefs and they appear to still be there, but obviously this is not up to date.

Has anyone else suffered with this?


***Edit***
Actually it appears some platforms haven't been affected - In one project I'm building exclusively contextual links within articles and all of the verified links are not missing from SER other than the MediaWiki ones.

Sven

I haven't changed anything on that part. Though I can see a problem when your proxies are not down but provide e.g. some error message (no empty reply). In that case the program sees content but no link and thinking the content coming from the site and removes that link.

davbel

Apart from 2, the proxies all seem OK in both SER and Scrapebox, but obviously I understand there could have been issues during the night.

I think I know what the answers are but...

Is there any sort of history or log file (apart from turning on the log file for the bottom window)?
Is there any setting to stop any activity if the proxies return an error message?

I know the links are still there, but it's just a bit frustrating to have lose all the T1 stuff to have to effectively start again with T2 etc

mozzer

Same issue here. I'm wondering if it could be related to https://forum.gsa-online.de/discussion/3932/gsa-freeze-after-hours-multiple-systems#latest

Sven

Sorry no history unless you made a backup.

antares

Verification via proxies can be disabled, if I read it right from the Options panel, and can be left with GSA using your direct internet connection.

I also experienced re-verified links vanishing, although they remained published - and decided to disable verification via proxies. It's not the only factor that impacts if links are getting verified or not, but at least I am confident that links don't get deleted due to proxy issues, regardless of the fact that I'm using private ones.

Finally, I have completely abandoned automatic re-verification. I now re-verify manually, say once a week.

I would like to know the logic behind re-verification process, i.e. how many attempts are there and for how long are they performed before GSA decides to delete a verified link?

Ozz

<I also experienced re-verified links vanishing, although they remained published - and decided to disable verification via proxies. It's not the only factor that impacts if links are getting verified or not, but at least I am confident that links don't get deleted due to proxy issues, regardless of the fact that I'm using private ones.

a benefit of using direct connection for verification is when the connection is down, then all proxies are down as well and SER will stop doing its things if "stop project on no active proxies" is enabled.

this will prevent the issues someone gets when their proxies are not working like expected.

davbel

@Ozz @Sven - stupid question, but there are no issues with using your connection without proxies to verify links?

It just goes directly to the site using the URL as if you'd just typed it in a browser?

Sven

yes thats what it does, no submission or anything alike.

Zeusy

However if you IP was leaking, there is a chance you will not be able to view forums, etc.. without entering a captcha as your ips will be listed.

This happened to me, when I had the problems.  I would view the verfied url in my broswer and get the spam captcha question.