Are your outbound links still alive?
External links rot quietly. A source you cited, a partner you linked, a tool you recommended — when it 404s, your page sends visitors to a dead end and looks neglected. Internal links are checked elsewhere; this checks the ones leaving your site.
Collects the external links from a sample of your pages and requests each one. Nothing is stored.
How this check works
Shipwork collects the external links on a sample of your pages and requests a bounded set of them, reporting any that return an error. It reads the links a crawler would follow, from outside your network, so it sees what a visitor clicking through would actually get.
Questions
- Why do outbound links break?
- Pages move, domains expire, and URLs change without redirects. A link that worked last year is often a 404 today.
- Do broken outbound links hurt SEO?
- They do not directly, but they waste the value of the link and signal a stale page. Fixing or removing them keeps the page useful.
- Does this check every external link?
- It checks a bounded sample from the pages it crawls, not every link on the site. A full pass is the paid deep crawl.