YouTube and Twitter Links Return 403 Forbidden

Hi @swapanmanna

I hope you’re well today!

As far as I can see, you seem to be using the “Local (Old)” engine in Broken Link Checker plugin. So please go to “Link Checker -> Local (old) -> Settings” page and in the “Protocols & APIs” tab enable checkbox for “YouTube API”, then save settings.

This should help for at least some of YouTube links.

However, if there are many of them being checked, there is still a chance that some of them will be marked as broken due to “403 Forbidden” status.

Unfortunately, this is due to how YouTube and many other big services work. They have a log of very advanced traffic filtering for security and resource preservation and they do detect that these checks appear to be (they actually are) automatic visits – similar to bots – and they block them because of that.

For YouTube enabling the YouTube API option should help override that to some degree. Unfortunately for X (formerly Twitter) there’s no such API available and there’s no workaround for that. This also applies to some other services, such as e.g. Instagram or some other that are behind CloudFlare with strict security settings.

For such cases, plugin report should only be treated as a “warning” and if you check given link manually and confirm that it’s fine, you would want to manually mark it as “Not broken” to be ignored.

Kind regards,
Adam

Hi @swapanmanna

We haven’t heard from you in a while, I’ll go and mark this thread as resolved. If you have any additional questions or require further help, please let us know!

Kind Regards,
Kris