Guide admins can create, edit, and remove links in any new or existing article in the knowledge base. Agents who are not Guide admins can create,edit, and remove links in articles where they have management permissions.
Inserting links in articles
You can insert a link in an article for existing text or at the point where your cursor appears.
To insert a link in an article
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, create a new article or edit an existing article.
- Highlight text or place the cursor where you want the link to appear, then click
Insert/edit link on the editor's toolbar.
- In the dialog box, do one of the following:
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To link to a URL, in the URL tab, paste in the link URL. For example,
https://zendesk.comNote: Make sure you include the entire URL, including the HTTP or HTTPS format. If you don't add the entire URL, you'll get a broken link. -
To link to a heading in this article, click the Heading tab, then
select a heading in the article.
The title of each heading appears, along with it's style, so that you know the heading level for each heading in the article.
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To link to an article in your Help Center, click the Help Center article tab, then select an article title that appears or enter a search for an article, then select an article that appears.
Click Clear beside the article title if you want to remove the link to an article and select a new article.
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To link to a URL, in the URL tab, paste in the link URL. For example,
- In Text on link, enter or edit the link text you want to appear in the
article.
If you highlighted text in the article before you click the Link button, the text appears in the field. If you edit the text here, it will update in the article.
- Select Open in new tab if you'd like the link to open in a new browser tab.
If the checkbox is not selected, the link will open in the current browser tab, replacing the article.
- Click Link.
The link appears in the article.
Editing links in articles
You can edit any existing link in an article to change the text or link target.
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, open an existing article in edit mode.
- Highlight the link you want to edit in the article.
- To change the link text, simply type over the existing text.
- To change the link target, click Insert/edit link on the editor's toolbar, then
do any of the following:
- In the URL tab, select the existing URL in the field and paste in a new URL, then click Link.
- Click the Heading tab, select a heading in the article, then click Link.
- Click the Help Center article tab, click Clear, if an article is currently selected, and select another article in your Help Center, then click Link
The link is updated in the article.
Removing links in articles
You can remove a link from text if you want to the text to be plain text and no longer a link.
To remove an existing link in an article
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, open an existing article in edit mode.
- Highlight the link you want to remove in the article.
- Click Insert/edit link on the editor's toolbar, then do any of the following:
- Click Remove link at the bottom of the dialog box.
The link is removed from the article.
40 Comments
Hi Ashley!
I have noticed the same thing!
I believe the list is in default order of the article that was updated most recently. What I do, is before I link the article, I will use the main search on the home page of my help center and find the article. Edit the article by just adding a blank space somewhere, save it, and republish the article. Now when you link the article, it will be at the top of the list, and won't need to search for it.
Ug, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the Article searcher when editing an article? We have several articles that link to many others, and when I'm going through inserting all of those links, having to do the method described would be more tedious than manually scrolling through. ALAS. I think it's just a broken feature that hopefully their dev team can fix soon!
@ashley -- I agree that HC searching often does not meet the intuitive standards that we have come to expect from (for example) Google search. That said, my experience is that using quote marks around a phrase is in fact respected and can zero in quickly on the desired article. (It helps that this is a usage pattern that matches google search behavior.)
Jonathan March Just did a test and still being weird. I searched for an article titled "Create a Project", using the quotes as suggested. And it was the 8th result in the list. Did another looking for an article titled "Camera Settings Overview" and it was 7th in the list. Alas. Im the only one on our team really dealing with this at the moment so it's fine, I'll just manually search for articles when linking as needed.
Sorry-- guess I've been lucky with "most recent" dominance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ashley Schwartau - same for me. This is a defect as the function used to work perfectly. I am going to open a ticket for this.
Jonathan March - this used to work fine. I've used it successfully for the past 3 years, creating hundreds of links between articles. Something has changed recently as even a search using the precise time of another article doesn't yield results in a sensible order.
Glad it wasn't just me! I was feeling kinda crazy. I spoke to tech support on live chat and they didn't truly understand what I was trying to convey and didnt have any helpful suggestions.
Ashley Schwartau - no - it definitely worked well, previously. It's now very frustrating not being able to link efficiently.
I have opened a ticket and will update this thread when I hear anything more.
We've noticed the following behavior when using the Help Center article tab in the Insert/edit link feature.
Articles will only display if you are part of the Managed by permission group of that article. If there is an article with a Managed by permission of group which you are not a part of, then the article will not display. This occurs even if you are part of the permission group for the Visible to setting. Is this expected behavior? In the scenario I outline, you can still insert the link to the published article by copying and pasting the URL; however, in my opinion, you should still be able to use the Help Center article tab to link to the article as well.
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