Internal and external link health
Healthy links keep users on working URLs and avoid unnecessary redirect hops. We surface broken internal and external links (from sampled requests), external links that redirect, and—on eligible long-form pages—cases with no internal links at all.
What we look for
- Broken internal links — sampled internal hrefs whose targets return error statuses (4xx/5xx), excluding HTTP 403.
- Broken external links — sampled external hrefs that fail (4xx/5xx or request failures), excluding HTTP 403.
- Redirecting external links — outbound links whose first hop returns HTTP 301 or 308.
- Internal link redirects — internal hrefs that first return HTTP 301 or 308 before reaching a final URL.
- No internal links — body content passes a length gate but no internal links were found in HTML.
What to do
Update or remove broken hrefs. Point external links to final URLs when stable. Add relevant internal links so important pages connect within your site graph.
When external links can look broken but are not
External link checks are server-side automated HTTP probes, not full browser sessions. Some websites block or challenge crawler-like traffic and may return responses such as 403 Forbidden to scanners they do not allow. To reduce false positives, HTTP 403 responses are not treated as broken-link triggers in these checks.
That means some broken external links findings can still be false positives even when the destination still loads for regular visitors. We cannot reliably distinguish every anti-bot response from a genuinely broken URL. If you have verified the destination works as intended, you can permanently ignore that possibility in your workspace.
Example
Use correct internal paths and stable external URLs in your anchors:
<p>
See also our
<a href="https://seoperception.com/products/leather-tote">leather tote</a>
and care tips from
<a href="https://supplier.example.com/leather-guide">our supplier</a>.
</p>Technical details
Link checks use bounded sampling and stored crawl results—see How the crawler works. For external links, first-hop temporary redirects (for example 302, 303, 307) are ignored for reporting; permanent redirects (301, 308) are reported as redirect issues. For broken and redirecting external link signals, we skip well-known social and shortener hosts (for example X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and t.co) so those targets do not drive link-health issues; we still discover and list all outbound hrefs on the page as usual.