How to Check External Links on Your Website (Without Breaking SEO)

Most webmasters wait until Google flags a broken link before they notice it. By then, the outbound link has been sending visitors to a 404 page — or worse, a phishing site — for weeks. The damage is already done: user trust eroded, PageRank leaked into a dead end, and your site associated with a malicious redirect chain.

Checking external links is not a once-a-quarter task. It is ongoing hygiene. This guide shows you exactly how to do it — efficiently, for free, without installing any software.

Why You Need to Check External Links Regularly

External links degrade silently. A page you linked to last year may have been sold, redirected through three intermediaries, or turned into a spam site — and your link still points there.

Here is what actually happens to outbound links over time:

• Domain expiry: A legitimate resource expires, gets bought by a domain squatter, and starts serving ads or malware. Your link still looks the same in your HTML.
• 301 redirect chains: The linked page moves once, then again. Your link now passes through 3 redirects before landing somewhere unexpected. Each hop can leak PageRank and slow your users.
• Content type changes: A dofollow link to an authoritative article becomes a link to a login page or paywall after a site redesign. The anchor text becomes misleading.
• Security compromise: The destination site gets hacked. URLs you linked to start serving malicious scripts or phishing pages.

Google's crawlers notice all of this. Sites with large numbers of broken or redirected outbound links are associated with lower crawl efficiency and reduced trust signals. More critically: if you link to malicious content, you can receive a manual action.

How to Check External Links with a Free Link Checker Tool

Paste any URL into Link Checker at mylinkchecker.com — it checks the HTTP status, follows the full redirect chain, and surfaces threat intelligence data in seconds.

Here is the exact workflow for auditing outbound links on a web page:

Step 1: Extract your external links

Use your browser's developer tools (F12 → Elements → search href="http) or a tool like Screaming Frog to export all outbound links from a page. You will get a list of raw URLs.

Step 2: Check each URL with a link checker

For each external URL, paste it into the free link checking tool. For every link you check, review:

• HTTP status code: 200 = live, 301/302 = redirect (check where it leads), 404 = broken
• Final destination URL: Is it where you expected? Or has it changed?
• Threat verdict: Is the destination flagged as phishing or malware?
• Domain age: Newly registered domains at the end of a redirect chain are a red flag

Step 3: Act on what you find

• 200 and clean → no action needed
• 301 to a different domain → update your link to the final destination
• 404 → either remove the link or replace with an alternative source
• Threat flagged → remove the link immediately and check if your site has been associated with the malicious domain in search console

What to Look for When Checking External Links for SEO

The three SEO signals that matter most in external link audits are: HTTP status, dofollow vs. nofollow attribute, and redirect chain length.

HTTP Status Codes

| Status | Meaning | Action | |--------|---------|--------| | 200 | Page is live | Verify content still matches your anchor text | | 301 | Permanent redirect | Update link to final URL | | 302 | Temporary redirect | Watch for chains; update if redirect is > 3 months old | | 404 | Page not found | Remove or replace | | 403 | Forbidden | Site is blocking crawlers; may still work for users | | 5xx | Server error | Check again in 24 hours; may be temporary |

Dofollow vs. Nofollow

A dofollow link passes PageRank (SEO equity) to the destination. A nofollow link does not. Link Checker inspects the rel attribute and HTTP response headers to tell you which type each link is.

If you are linking to sources you vouch for — academic papers, official documentation, industry reports — those should generally be dofollow. If you are linking to user-generated content, paid placements, or affiliate pages, use rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".

Redirect Chain Depth

Every redirect hop adds latency and risks losing PageRank. Google can follow up to 5 redirects, but link equity dilutes with each hop. A link that sends visitors through 4 intermediaries before reaching a page is functionally broken from an SEO perspective.

Link Checker shows you the full redirect chain: every HTTP hop, every URL, every status code. If you see a chain longer than 2 hops, update the link to point directly to the final destination.

Checking External Links for Security Threats

Never assume HTTPS means safe. Phishing sites routinely use HTTPS, valid SSL certificates, and even stolen branding to appear legitimate.

This is the most underappreciated aspect of checking external links: security. SEO professionals focus on status codes and PageRank, but the real risk is linking to a page that has been compromised or that was always malicious.

Real scenarios I have seen:

1. A recipe blog linked to a small cooking tool supplier. The supplier's domain expired, was acquired by a malware distributor, and now serves drive-by download scripts. The blog link was live for 6 months after this.

2. A cybersecurity resource page linked to a "password strength checker" tool. The tool was later found to be harvesting entered passwords. The referring domain received a manual action from Google.

3. A news site linked to a legitimate press release. The URL was later reused for a phishing page impersonating a bank after the original content was removed.

When you check external links using Link Checker's threat intelligence, each URL is cross-referenced against multiple databases that track phishing, malware, and fraudulent domains. A clean HTTP 200 response is not sufficient — you need threat intelligence to confirm the destination is actually safe.

Building a Systematic External Link Audit Process

The most effective link audit cadence is monthly for high-traffic pages and quarterly for the full site. Automation only helps if you have a way to act on the results.

Here is a practical audit schedule that works for most content-heavy websites:

Monthly checks (high-priority pages):

• Homepage outbound links
• Pillar content pages with 10+ external links
• Pages that rank in the top 10 for primary keywords

For each high-priority page, extract the external links, run them through the link checker tool, and log the results in a spreadsheet with columns: URL, check date, status, threat verdict, action taken.

Quarterly checks (full site sweep):

• Export all external links from your entire site using a crawl tool
• Run spot-checks on links to domains you do not recognize
• Prioritize links that redirect — these are most likely to have changed destination

Trigger-based checks (immediate):

• When you get a security alert about a linked domain
• When a linked site's contact information changes (often signals ownership change)
• When anchor text no longer matches destination content

Checking external links does not require expensive enterprise software. The combination of a crawl tool for extraction and Link Checker for individual URL verification covers the vast majority of use cases for free.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I check external links on my website?

Export all outbound URLs from your site using browser developer tools or a crawl tool like Screaming Frog. Then paste each URL into a free link checker tool like Link Checker to verify the HTTP status code, redirect chain, threat verdict, and dofollow/nofollow attribute. Focus first on high-traffic pages and links to domains you do not control. Check high-priority pages monthly and the full site quarterly.

Q: What is the best free tool to check broken external links?

Link Checker is free, requires no account, and checks both HTTP status (broken links) and threat intelligence (unsafe links) in one scan. For bulk audits, Screaming Frog's free tier crawls up to 500 URLs and exports external links as a CSV that you can then verify individually. The combination covers most site sizes without cost.

Q: Why are external links important for SEO?

External links to authoritative sources signal to search engines that your content is well-researched and connected to the broader web of knowledge on a topic. However, broken or toxic outbound links do the opposite — they indicate poor content maintenance, waste crawl budget, and can associate your domain with low-quality or malicious destinations. Google's quality guidelines explicitly note that sites linking to "spammy" destinations are assessed negatively.

Q: How do I know if an external link is dofollow or nofollow?

Right-click any link in your browser and select "Inspect Element." Look for rel="nofollow", rel="ugc", or rel="sponsored" in the anchor tag. If none of these rel attributes are present, the link is dofollow and passes PageRank. Link Checker inspects both the rel attribute and HTTP headers when you submit a URL, so you can verify the link type without reading source code.

Q: What happens if my website has too many broken external links?

Broken external links do not directly penalize your site, but they signal poor maintenance to Google's quality evaluators. Pages with many broken outbound links often have lower crawl priority over time. More seriously: links that redirect to malicious content or that point to flagged domains can trigger manual review. Fix broken links promptly — remove or replace 404s, and update redirected links to point directly to the final URL.

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