site.broken-external-links

What to change

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on a crawl or a build directory. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.broken-external-links

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.broken-external-links"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.broken-external-links on the command, or disableRules: ["site.broken-external-links"] to a tool.

• Warningsite.soft-404A clearly non-existent URL returns HTTP 200 instead of 404.
• Warningsite.http-not-redirectedThe http:// version of the site does not redirect to https://.
• Warningsite.host-variant-not-redirectedThe www/non-www variant of the host does not redirect to the main host.
• Warningsite.hreflang-no-return-linkhreflang alternates do not link back to the page that references them.
• Infosite.unlinked-pagesHTML files in the build output that no other page links to.
• Errorsite.canonical-target-brokenPages name a canonical URL that answers 4xx/5xx or does not load, so search engines cannot use it.
• Warningsite.canonical-target-redirectsPages name a canonical URL that redirects; the canonical should be the final URL.
• Warningsite.canonical-target-noindexPages name as canonical a page that is set to noindex, so the page meant to be indexed is kept out of the index.