What counts as an outbound link
To check outgoing links on a website, first decide whether you need a full inventory of link destinations or want to find broken links in a sample. An outbound link, also called an external link, points from your page to a different site. A link to another page on your own site is internal. Outbound links help readers verify a source or reach a useful resource; the question is whether the destination still supports what your page says.
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. Crawl the site and export its external outlinks to build a broad inventory, including links on pages you forgot you had. Then check their destinations and review any errors. The free outbound link checker takes a quick sample: it probes up to 15 unique destinations from sampled pages.
- Search Console is for a different direction. Its Links report shows external sites linking to you and links between your own pages. It is not an outbound-link inventory.
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.
Check outgoing links: a source-page example
Suppose your buying guide at /learn/choosing-linen links to a supplier's retired care page. Run the outgoing link checker, then use the source page beside the destination to locate the citation. A confirmed 404 or 410 is a reason to investigate. Open the destination in a browser and look for an equivalent replacement before editing your guide.
If the supplier moved the same advice to a new URL, replace the old href with that final address. If the content disappeared, find a source that supports the same statement or revise the statement. Do not substitute an unrelated home page just to eliminate the error. Run the check again and confirm that the changed source page was sampled.
A successful destination response does not prove the citation is accurate, and an unreported destination may simply be outside the status-probe limit. Use a full crawl export when you need a site-wide outgoing-link inventory; use this sample to find specific repairs quickly.
What to check on each one
- Does it still resolve? A confirmed 404 or 410 indicates the destination has gone. A 5xx may be temporary, so retry before changing a useful citation.
- 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 a paid placement? Mark advertising and paid links with
rel="sponsored". Usenofollowwhen you do not want to endorse a destination. Ordinary editorial citations do not need either attribute.
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 collects outbound links from sampled pages, probes up to 15 unique destinations with HEAD requests, and reports confirmed 404 or 410 responses. Check important links in a browser before editing. Free, no account, no signup. Paste your store address.
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