diff --git a/lib/Cron/Workers/SendingQueue.php b/lib/Cron/Workers/SendingQueue.php
index 9876307da2..b9cd6d5bf3 100644
--- a/lib/Cron/Workers/SendingQueue.php
+++ b/lib/Cron/Workers/SendingQueue.php
@@ -202,19 +202,11 @@ class SendingQueue {
     return array($rendered_newsletter, $rendered_newsletter_hash);
   }
 
-  function processLinks($text, $newsletter_id, $queue_id) {
-    list($text, $processed_links) =
-      Links::process($text, $links = false, $process_link_shortcodes = true);
-    foreach($processed_links as $link) {
-      // save extracted and processed links
-      $newsletter_link = NewsletterLink::create();
-      $newsletter_link->newsletter_id = $newsletter_id;
-      $newsletter_link->queue_id = $queue_id;
-      $newsletter_link->hash = $link['hash'];
-      $newsletter_link->url = $link['url'];
-      $newsletter_link->save();
-    }
-    return $text;
+  function processLinks($content, $newsletter_id, $queue_id) {
+    list($content, $processed_links) =
+      Links::process($content, $links = false, $process_link_shortcodes = true);
+    Links::save($processed_links, $newsletter_id, $queue_id);
+    return $content;
   }
 
   function processNewsletter($newsletter, $subscriber = false, $queue) {
diff --git a/lib/Newsletter/Links/Links.php b/lib/Newsletter/Links/Links.php
index 47c8eec80b..c63b6c46f2 100644
--- a/lib/Newsletter/Links/Links.php
+++ b/lib/Newsletter/Links/Links.php
@@ -1,13 +1,14 @@
 <?php
 namespace MailPoet\Newsletter\Links;
 
+use MailPoet\Models\NewsletterLink;
 use MailPoet\Newsletter\Shortcodes\Shortcodes;
 use MailPoet\Util\Security;
 
 class Links {
   const DATA_TAG = '[mailpoet_data]';
 
-  static function extract($content, $process_link_shortcodes = false) {
+  static function extract($content) {
     // adopted from WP's wp_extract_urls() function &  modified to work on hrefs
       # match href=' or href="
     $regex = '#(?:href.*?=.*?)(["\']?)('
@@ -25,8 +26,8 @@ class Links {
       . ')+'
       . ')'
       . ')\\1#';
-    $shortcodes = new Shortcodes();
     // extract shortcodes with [url:*] format
+    $shortcodes = new Shortcodes();
     $shortcodes = $shortcodes->extract($content, $limit = array('link'));
     // extract links
     preg_match_all($regex, $content, $links);
@@ -42,7 +43,7 @@ class Links {
       $shortcodes = new Shortcodes();
       $content = $shortcodes->replace($content, $limit = array('link'));
     }
-    $links = ($links) ? $links : self::extract($content, $process_link_shortcodes);
+    $links = ($links) ? $links : self::extract($content);
     $processed_links = array();
     foreach($links as $link) {
       $hash = Security::generateRandomString(5);
@@ -72,4 +73,15 @@ class Links {
       $content
     );
   }
+
+  static function save($links, $newsletter_id, $queue_id) {
+    foreach($links as $link) {
+      $newsletter_link = NewsletterLink::create();
+      $newsletter_link->newsletter_id = $newsletter_id;
+      $newsletter_link->queue_id = $queue_id;
+      $newsletter_link->hash = $link['hash'];
+      $newsletter_link->url = $link['url'];
+      $newsletter_link->save();
+    }
+  }
 }
\ No newline at end of file