Check Outbound Links from Website

Outbound links of a website can be understood as internal outgoing links or external (backlinks).

Both are important to understand for your SEO.

Internal cross-links are one of the most underutilized SEO efforts, but they can quickly show effectiveness. Here you can learn how to perform an internal link audit.

In this blog post, we will check external outbound links.

What are outbound links?

Outbound links are links from your website to other websites. Instead of links to your website from other referring domains (backlinks), it is the links from your domain.

Why should I check my website’s outbound links SEO?

Outbound links of a website are important to your SEO. Mainly you should pay attention to three things when checking your links:

• Broken links
• Too many links
• Not relevant links

5 tools to check outbound links (Outbound Link Checker)

Unfortunately, there is no very easy way to determine and check the outbound links of a page. Of course, you can manually check each page link but this activity is not scalable. Google Search Console or Google Analytics do not provide the required insights either. For example, Google Search Console only allows you to view the inbound backlinks and internal links, but not to check outbound links.

Therefore, we need to use external SEO tools or outbound link checkers. Some tools already give free insights, while others require premium subscriptions.

Almost all SEO tools have the ability to detect on-site SEO errors and point out all broken outbound links. Below I have listed 5 tools that are known to me and that I also use regularly. Ahref or Moz for example are not included, because I don’t use them and therefore can’t give an opinion.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a very robust SEO and paid media marketing tool. SEMRush gives deep insights about the backlinks pointing to your site or your competitors but also a good overview of on-site SEO errors. It also includes broken outbound links. If a link is broken due to a 404 error, for example, this is displayed in the SEMRush dashboard and you can update or remove this link.

You can also see a backlink profile of your domain and competitors and compare if you are using above-average outbound links.

SEMRush outbound links identification is super easy within the tool.

Ubersuggest Outbound Link Checker

Ubersuggest is another tool that shows on-site SEO errors. If you have broken external links on your site, they will be displayed. However, the view of the errors is limited with the free version. Depending on how many errors you have on the page, you may or may not see the broken links.

SEOBility

SEOBility allows in the free version to create one website project. Thereby, all on-site SEO errors are displayed and therefore also non-functioning outgoing links. However, the exact errors per category are limited to 25. So if you have more than 25 broken links, you have to remove them first before you can check the links again.

Sitechecker.pro

Sitechecker gives you the possibility to even check single pages instead of the whole domain for free. It also lists all outgoing links with a status.

Sitechecker also has a Google Chrome extension that makes it easier to check individual pages.

SEO Minion

SEO Minion is an excellent Google Chrome extension for analyzing external links. SEO Minion can show all broken outbound links, but also highlight all different links (internal, external, follow, or no-follow). Then you can see directly in the text which links are external no-follow links for example. Additionally, SEO Minion highlights the links in different colors depending on the link status.

Conclusion

Because of the simple view and adjustments, SEO Minion is my recommendation for a short real-time website check. But also Sitechecker is a good free choice on the go. For continuous updates on outbound links, SEOBility is a great free resource.

Anyways, if you want a robust solution with more features like outbound to inbound link ratio and quality, you should consider a solution like SEMRush.