What counts as an outbound link
An outbound link, also called an external link, is any link on your page whose destination is a different domain from yours. Everything pointing back into your own site is internal. The distinction matters because search engines treat the two differently: internal links move authority around inside your site, while outbound links spend a little of it on someone else.
Three things make an outbound link worth checking. It can be broken, returning a 404 or a server error, so a reader who trusted your recommendation hits a dead end. It can be slow, going through one or more redirects before it lands. And it can point at a domain you would rather not be associated with: a scraped affiliate link, a spammy directory, or a page that changed hands and no longer says what it did when you linked it.
How to find the outbound links on a website
There are three practical ways, in increasing order of effort.
- View source and search. On a single page, view the HTML and search for
href="http. Every match that is not your own domain is an outbound link. Fast for one page, useless across a whole site. - A crawler. Point a crawler at your site and export the links it finds. This is the only way to see outbound links across every page, including ones you forgot you had. The free outbound-links check does it for a single page in seconds.
- Search Console. The Links report shows the external sites your pages link to most, which tells you where your outbound links concentrate, but not every URL and not whether each still works.
The reason to crawl rather than eyeball is that outbound links accumulate. A blog post from three years ago, a supplier page you linked once, a footer badge: each is invisible until something breaks.
What to check on each one
- Does it still resolve? A 404, a 410 or a 5xx is a broken recommendation. Either point it at the new URL or remove the link.
- How many hops? A link that redirects once to a canonical URL is fine. Two or more hops is a slow path a reader will abandon.
- Is the domain dead? A hostname that no longer resolves is worse than a 404, because the browser hangs before it fails.
- Is it trustworthy? If the destination is a low-quality directory, or a page that changed topic since you linked it, the link now says something about you that you did not intend.
- Is it followed or nofollowed? Editorial links to sources you trust can be followed. Links you were paid for, or to untrusted destinations, should carry
rel="nofollow"orrel="sponsored".
Linking out to a good source is expected and healthy. The audit is not about deleting outbound links, it is about making sure the ones you have still work and still deserve the recommendation.
Fix, remove, or mark
Fix a broken link when the destination moved and the link still helps a reader. Remove it when the page it pointed at is gone and nothing replaces it. Update a redirecting link to its final URL so the reader skips the hop. Mark a commercial or untrusted link with the right rel attribute instead of leaving it followed. And recheck on a schedule: outbound links rot silently, which is exactly the kind of thing a one-off audit misses.
Related: broken links check · orphan pages · link graph · fixing broken internal links
Shipwork extracts every outbound link from a page, requests each one from outside your network, and reports the ones that are broken, redirecting or unreachable. Free, no account, no signup. Paste your store address.
Check my outbound linksQuestions
- How do I find all the outbound links on my site?
- Crawl the site and export the links, rather than viewing source page by page. That is the only way to see outbound links on pages you have forgotten about. The free outbound-links check does a single page; a crawler does the whole site.
- How do I check if an outbound link is broken?
- Request it the way a visitor would. A 404, a 410 or a 5xx means it is broken; a chain of redirects means it is slow. Shipwork requests each outbound link from outside your network and reports what came back.
- Do outbound links hurt SEO?
- No. Linking out to good sources is normal and expected. Broken links, links to dead domains, and links to low-quality destinations are what hurt, because each one is a recommendation you no longer stand behind.
- Should outbound links be nofollow?
- Only some. Editorial links to sources you trust can be followed. Links you were paid for should use rel="sponsored", and links to untrusted destinations should use rel="nofollow". Marking everything nofollow throws away a normal part of a useful page.
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