External link checker
Check external links on your page: which pass link equity and which are nofollow
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This check only covers external links. For a full picture of your page, run a page audit.
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What are external links and why they matter
External links point to other websites — cited sources, referenced documentation, social share targets, affiliate partners, user-submitted URLs, and more. They shape two things SEO cares about: the signals search engines derive about the quality of your content (linking to authoritative sources is a positive signal, not a leak), and the engagement behavior of your users (external links that open in the same tab pull people away from your site mid-visit). Modern Google guidance is not "nofollow everything external" — it's "mark up links correctly according to their nature."
What this tool checks
- External link count — how many point to third-party domains
- Follow / nofollow / sponsored / ugc — the four rel values Google understands for external links
- Service/utility links — analytics, messengers, and social share buttons are categorized separately (they're not editorial content links)
- Empty anchors — external
<a>tags with no text and no image inside - Generic anchor text — "click here", "read more", etc. dilute the signal
- Blanket nofollow pattern — when every external link uses nofollow (looks manipulative)
- target="_blank" — external links in the same tab hurt engagement
Modern rel attribute options
- rel="nofollow" — generic "don't count this link" signal. Use for untrusted or irrelevant external links.
- rel="sponsored" (2019+) — paid or affiliate links. Google requires this (or nofollow) for paid placements; not disclosing them risks a manual action.
- rel="ugc" (2019+) — user-generated content links (comments, forums, user-submitted profiles).
- No rel attribute (follow) — your editorial choice to cite this source. Treated as a positive trust signal.
Good vs bad examples
Good — editorial citation to an authoritative source, no rel attribute needed:
<a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs" target="_blank">Google Search Central docs</a>Good — paid placement correctly marked:
<a href="https://affiliate.example.com/?ref=ours" rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy on partner site</a>Good — user-submitted comment link:
<a href="https://user-site.com" rel="ugc" target="_blank">commenter name</a>Bad — generic anchor gives Google no signal about the target:
<a href="https://some-site.com/article-about-seo" target="_blank">click here</a>Bad — blanket nofollow on every external link (outdated tactic, looks manipulative):
<a href="https://wikipedia.org/..." rel="nofollow">Wikipedia</a>
<a href="https://mdn.org/..." rel="nofollow">MDN</a>
<!-- etc., every external with nofollow -->Bad — paid link without sponsored / nofollow (violates Google policy, can trigger manual action):
<a href="https://affiliate.example.com/?ref=ours">Recommended hosting</a>Common mistakes
- Blanket nofollow on every external link — a pre-2019 tactic that now looks manipulative. Only nofollow/sponsored/ugc what actually matches those categories.
- Missing rel="sponsored" on affiliate links — Google explicitly requires this (or nofollow) for paid placements; missing disclosure is a policy violation.
- External links opening in the same tab — users navigate away from your site and usually don't come back. Add
target="_blank". - Generic anchor text — "click here" to an external source wastes the signal and reduces accessibility.
- Over-reliance on rel="noopener" — as of Chrome 88 / Firefox 79 / Safari 12.1 (~94% browser coverage),
target="_blank"implies noopener behavior automatically. Adding rel="noopener" is still a reasonable defensive practice for in-app webviews and older browsers, but it's not the security emergency it was in 2018. - Empty anchors —
<a href="..."></a>with no content is inaccessible and useless. - Linking to low-quality or spammy domains — reputational and SEO risk. If you must link, use nofollow.
Frequently asked questions
No, if you link to quality and relevant resources. Google has confirmed that linking to authoritative sources is normal practice. Problems arise if a page links to spammy or malicious sites.
No. Making all external links nofollow is an outdated tactic. Links to authoritative sources (Wikipedia, official documentation) are better left dofollow — they show search engines that your content is backed by reliable sources.
All three tell Google not to count the link as an editorial endorsement. The difference is context:
nofollow is the generic "don't count this" signal; sponsored (introduced in 2019) is specifically for paid/affiliate links and is required for those by Google policy; ugc is for user-generated content (comments, forum posts). Google recommends the specific attribute when it fits. Using plain nofollow for a paid link still works but is less specific.Not critically, as of 2026. Chrome 88 (Jan 2021), Firefox 79 (Jul 2020), and Safari 12.1 (Mar 2019) all implicitly apply noopener behavior to every
target="_blank" link — covering about 94% of browsers per caniuse. The original tabnabbing attack it protected against is blocked at the browser level in modern engines. Still, there's some value in adding it explicitly for in-app webviews (Facebook/Instagram internal browsers, older Android), defensive-coding standards, and linter compliance. Low-priority now, not a security emergency.There's no hard limit. Historic SEO guides mentioned "keep under 100 links per page" but that was for PageRank-flow calculations a decade ago. Today, link out as much as the content warrants. What matters is whether each link is editorially justified — a well-researched article with twenty citations is a positive signal, a link farm with thousands is a negative one. Balance and relevance, not count.
follow is not a real rel directive. Google recognizes nofollow, sponsored, and ugc as link-behavior signals — but "follow" is not the opposite of nofollow, it's just an invented term. The correct way to express "this is a follow link" is to have no rel attribute at all (or no link-directive value in rel). Writing rel="follow" has zero effect — the link is still follow, but the attribute is noise. Similar typos we flag: dofollow (made-up meme term), no-follow (with dash — silently ignored), nofolow / nofollwo (spelling typos that fail silently and leave the link effectively follow).