After copying a tree, page links point to old tree pages after I edit a page in new tree
Asked by Sean O'Donnell:

I realize there have been similar threads for this question, but none seem to have an answer for my particular situation.

I have a tree with more than 300 child pages that I have copied numerous times. However, on my two most recent copies (within the last 2 months), the page links revert to pointing to the old tree ++only after I edit the page++.

So, simply put: The old tree is version 1.0. The new tree is version 2.0. After copying the tree from 1.0 to 2.0, the links work fine. When I edit a page in the 2.0 tree and publish, the links point to 1.0 again.

My workaround is to **edit** a page of the new tree, click the **ellipsis** , and **revert the page to the last published version**. This fixes the link issue when I go back in to edit the page. However, doing that for more than 300 pages is rather time-consuming.

I'm wondering why this happened in the first place, and how I can fix this going forward. Thanks in advance for your help.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

What types of link are you using? Are they the internal \[space:page\]() links or hard copies of the URLs for the pages?

comments: author: Sean O'Donnell
body: The URLs are structured this way: mysite.atlassian.net/spaces/\[name_of_space\]/pages/\[page_number\]/\[page_title\]


author: Sean O'Donnell
body: Nic, do you happen to have something I can try to solve this problem?


author: Andrii Maliuta
body: Hello [@Sean O_Donnell](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5276295) ,

Are the links stored on page as

```
ac:link> ..... </ac:link>
```

or as

```
<a href="xxx" ....... </a>
```

?


author: Sean O'Donnell
body: Hi [@Andrii Maliuta](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/484201) the links are in this format:

```
<a href="xxx" ....... </a>
```


author: Andrii Maliuta
body: [@Sean O_Donnell](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5276295) ,

If the links are set as simple HTML '\<a\>', so it should not be changed anyhow by copying pages, as it is treated by Confluence as WEB link and should remain static - only \<ac:link\> are treated as content entities and change according to copy/move/rename, etc.

It is strange that editing a page influences the format of the links somehow. I can think just of some 3-rd party app influencing this behavior :(


author: Sean O'Donnell
body: Thanks [@Andrii Maliuta](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/484201)

I just came across this page: <https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-storage-format-790796544.html>

In the **Links** section, I see it lists the types of links you mentioned. Perhaps my links contain markup tags or something that isn't permitted to maintain the \<ac:link\> status?


author: Andrii Maliuta
body: [@Sean O_Donnell](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5276295) ,

Maybe you can check the **Storage Format** of pages to see if this is the case, though the link usually cannot contain such attributes. But sometimes if the content is copied from other web resources, the dat ais pasted with hidden tags into the editor, so it cannot be seen by eye, but is present in HTML :(


author: Sean O'Donnell
body: [@Andrii Maliuta](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/484201)

I will look into that and see if I can find anything that makes sense. Thank you for your help. It's greatly appreciated.


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