Publishing and what happens next

There are two ways an article leaves Rankbench, and the first one does not involve you.

On its scheduled day

If the calendar is running and a connection exists, each article is written on its day and sent where you publish, as a draft or live depending on the connection.

The setting behind it says exactly that: an article is written on each scheduled day and sent wherever you have connected.

The status line above the grid tells you what will happen next, in your timezone, including whether anything is connected to receive it.

This is the point of the product. Once it is set up you are reviewing rather than operating.

By hand, from the day page

Open a written day, choose where it goes and whether it goes as a draft or live, and send it. The per-connection default is pre-selected and can be overridden for this one article.

Use this for the first article, so you can watch the whole path work before trusting it to run on its own.

The statuses

A day moves through them in order.

Planned, a keyword on a date.

Ready to write, its day has come.

Drafts, written and not yet published.

Sent to your CMS, on its way or waiting for your approval there.

Published, live, with a link to the post.

Whether it is really live

Your CMS taking an article is not the same as readers seeing it, so Rankbench looks at each article's address about ten minutes after it goes out. A draft you publish later is noticed within a day, and the card then says Published.

Sent as a draft means it is waiting in your CMS for you to publish it there.

Not live yet means your CMS accepted it as live, but its address shows readers nothing: not found, private, or a login page. Open it in your CMS and check its status.

If the address cannot be read, for example because your site blocks automated visits, nothing changes on the card. Articles on your Rankbench blog are not looked at this way; their state is shown from the blog itself.

The four figures above the grid count them.

Changing an article after it has gone out

An article that has been sent stays sent when you edit it, redraw its pictures or write it again. It is never sent a second time on its own.

If it went to your Rankbench blog, change the post on the blog; the day page links to it. Anything that does change the article here follows it to the post, or arrives as a suggestion if the post was edited on the blog.

In any other CMS nothing is sent again, because sending again would make a second post. The day page says so above the article: make the same change in your CMS too.

When it fails

Publishing can fail for ordinary reasons: a password changed, a site moved, an API stopped accepting the request.

When it does, you are told rather than the article quietly not appearing. A notification says an article could not be published, or that your publishing connection needs attention, and the day records what happened.

The usual causes are credentials that expired, a connection pointing at a site that has moved, or a CMS refusing the post. Test the connection from Where it publishes, fix it, and send the article again from its day page.

If the whole calendar stops running, that is reported too rather than being left to look like a quiet week.

Pausing

Pause sits beside the status line and in Brief & settings. The setting is blunt about what it means: nothing is written and nothing is sent until you start it again.

Use it for a quiet month, a rebrand, or while you fix a connection. Nothing already written is lost, and the plan stays.

What to check on your site afterwards

For the first few, open the published post on your own site and check three things: the title and description came across, the images loaded, and the internal links point where they should.

If images are missing, your CMS may be blocking them. The webhook guide covers what an endpoint needs to do to let them through.

Afterwards

Published articles appear in All articles, and if the site audit later finds a problem with one, it appears in Rewrites with the finding that justifies it. See all articles, and rewrites the audit asks for.

If you are in Automatic backlinks, published articles are also the inventory it places links into. See Automatic backlinks.

Where to go next

Connecting where it publishes is the setup this depends on.