SPO Publishing Site Determine Forward and Backward Links for a Resource

[Steven Sanders]

Our intranet is built on classic SPO publishing sites.  Content owners need help finding references to resources to manage expired content by cleaning up hyperlinks to expired content on pages.  I learned that they are using _layouts/15/sitemanager to select a resource then identify links to that resource.  For example, select a file in a document library and determine which pages reference that document.

This is a tedious activity to determine links file-by-file, page-by-page, and requires site collection admin privilege to use site manager.  There must be a better way so I searched for a solution in PnP and elsewhere.  All I found was a dated Blog that used PowerShell to get the list items then use file.BackwardLinks and file.ForwardLinks.

• Is this property available in SPO PowerShell?  Could not find any references.

Is it possible to build a PnP or SPO PowerShell solution that a site owner could use to gather all files in a given library, or even site, and generate a report showing all references within that site collection to each file?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Looks like you might be out of luck.

Server side object model gives you the property, Which you wont be able to use with SharePoint online.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.sharepoint.spfile.backwardlinks?view=sharepoin...

CSOM, which you can use with SharePoint online does not have that property.

[#3]

Thank you for confirming what I expected.

[#4]

No problem, please mark as solution :)