After you have fixed things, the quickest way to see whether it worked is Scan again, at the top right of any finished report. It runs the same scan on the same sitemap and sets the result against the one you started from.
How a rescan is labelled
- The report carries a Rescan label under its title, with the date of the scan it repeats and a button to the original.
- The original carries a note that it has been rescanned, with a button to the latest rescan.
- In your History and Recent scans lists, a rescan has a Rescan label next to it.
- The scan-complete email says it is a rescan, and gives the difference in one sentence before anything else.
How the comparison is made
The two scans are counted the same way, under the same priorities, so a number in one can be set directly against the same number in the other. A finding is matched by the address it links to.
| In the rescan | It is listed as |
|---|---|
| Flagged now, and not flagged before | New since the original scan |
| Flagged now, and flagged before | Still flagged, with what changed if anything we record has changed |
| Flagged before, not flagged now | No longer flagged, with what we saw when we read its page again |
For every link that is no longer flagged, Link Signals reads the page the link was on again, up to 60 links in one rescan, and records what it found. It does not assume.
| What we saw | What the report says |
|---|---|
| The link is no longer on the page | The link is no longer there. |
| The page itself no longer exists | The page it was on no longer exists. |
| The link is still there and still flagged | It stays in the report as still flagged. A rescan that did not reach the page does not hide it. |
| The link is still there and not flagged | The fields that differ are listed, for example the result, the HTTP status or the page title. |
| We could not read the page | Not confirmed. It is never counted as fixed. |
Links you have trusted
On a paid plan you can trust a link that you put there on purpose. If a finding in the original scan is now trusted, the comparison shows it in its own list, “Trusted by you, so no longer counted”, with the sentence “You trust this link, so it is no longer counted. We did not read its page again, so this does not say whether it is still there.”
- It is never called fixed or no longer flagged, and it is not counted as unconfirmed.
- Its page is not read again, so no link checks are spent on it.
- The comparison table has a row, “Links you trust, counted as safe”. The rescan’s counts, such as Needs review and Not safe, change because those links are now counted as safe, and the trusted links are the reason.
What the overview shows
- The comparison table: each priority, then and now, and the change. Below it, the new findings, the ones no longer flagged and the ones still flagged.
- The leading paragraph: written from the rescan’s own findings, in the same way as for a new scan.
- What to fix, in order: the same priorities, most urgent first. Each step says how it moved since the original scan. A priority that has cleared says so, and a priority with nothing before and nothing now is left out.
- Numbers: every number opens the links it counts. A number with no list behind it is not shown, and on a rescan a zero is not shown either.
Why an unchanged site gives the same answer
The AI check is set to answer the same way for the same input, and its answer is kept for as long as the link’s destination, the page it is on and how it is marked are unchanged. So a rescan only differs where something differs. If you see a difference with no change you can point to, the comparison shows exactly which recorded field changed.
Rescan, re-check or monitor
| Use | When |
|---|---|
| Rescan | You want the whole site checked again and set against the last scan. |
| Re-check | You only want the flagged links read again, without a full scan. |
| Monitoring | You want it to happen on a schedule, with an email when something new turns up. |
Questions
Does a rescan use my link allowance?
Yes, like any scan. The links read again to confirm what changed are counted too.
Can I rescan a scan that is still running?
No. Scan again appears once a scan has finished. If a scan is already running, you are taken to it.
What if the original report was re-checked first?
The comparison uses the original’s findings as they were last saved, so links you cleared with a re-check are not counted as new problems in the rescan.
How this counts in your LinkSignal
A rescan works out your site’s external LinkSignal again and shows how it moved since the scan before. Links that were fixed stop costing points, and new findings add to the cost, so the change is explained by the same rows as the score itself. The LinkSignal overview describes the rows, and how the score is worked out gives the rules. LinkSignal is Link Signals’ own metric, worked out only from what this tool finds, and it is not connected to any search engine or third-party score.
Open a finished report and choose Scan again to compare.
