Does Oh Dear check external links too?
Yes. The broken links check follows both internal links (pages on your own domain) and external links (to other websites), though external checking is off by default.
Enabling external link checks
- Open the monitor.
- Go to Settings > Broken Links.
- Toggle Check external links on.
- Save.
From the next crawl onwards, we verify that every external link points to a reachable page too.
How external link checking works
For external links, we send an HTTP request to the URL and check the response. Anything in the 200-399 range counts as working. 4xx / 5xx responses, DNS failures, and timeouts are reported as broken.
We respect rel="nofollow" on outbound links (since the spec says automated tools shouldn't follow them), but we do still verify the URL resolves, so you're told if the target is broken even when you don't want it counted for SEO.
Why it's off by default
Two reasons:
- External links break often. Another site can remove a page, change its URL, or go offline entirely. That shows up as a broken link on your site even though you haven't done anything. If you don't want to hear about those, keeping external checks off is cleaner.
- Some hosts rate-limit aggressive crawling. When we check many external links to the same host, we can get 429s back. Keeping external checks opt-in lets you decide if you want to accept that trade-off.
Excluding specific external URLs
If external checks are on but a specific URL keeps reporting as broken for reasons outside your control (rate limiting, flaky hosts, LinkedIn's well-known anti-bot behaviour), you can add it to the exclusion list so it's skipped on future crawls.
Full docs: Broken links detection.
