How to Check All External Links on a Website?
Nowadays, our websites often link to external links to improve the user experience, provide additional information, and for many other reasons. Sometimes, there is a need that arises specially for webmasters, SEO specialists, and others who need to find all the external links on a website for different purposes like checking broken links, improving SEO strategies and looking for the right way to find all external links on a website. We have seen several user requests on various forum websites where users have asked for a solution that can check all the external links of the website and provide them with a list.
So, if you are also one of them who has the same task to perform, then this article will be very helpful for you.
Why Check External Links of a Website?
- SEO Analysis: External links are very important and contribute to a website’s backlink profile. By examining all the external links on your website, you can easily identify potentially valuable link building opportunities or harmful links that can affect your website.
- Content Auditing: These links are often used for important purposes. By checking external links, content managers can ensure the accuracy and relevance of links and update them when needed.
- Competitor Analysis: By checking and identifying external links on a competitor’s website, you can also get similar links for your website or partner with high-authority domains.
- For User Experience: Broken or redirected external links can frustrate users. Therefore, checking all external links ensures that the user will have a smooth and uninterrupted experience.
In short, checking external links on a website helps in maintaining the quality, safety, and integrity.
How to Find All External Links on A Website?
There are multiple ways to check and find all external links of a website with their own pros and cons.
Method 1: Manually Search External Links (Basic Method But Time Consuming)
- Step 1: Open any webpage, right-click and choose Inspect or use Ctrl+U shortcut key.
- Step 2: Now, use browser’s find feature to search for the href attributes within <a> tags.
- Step 3: Look for the links that have the URL pointing to external domains means whose links that don’t start with same domain of the size you are analyzing).
Limitation of Manual Search
This method is not for large websites with multiple pages as it requires the manual checking of each page’s HTML source code.
Method 2: Google Search Operators (Advanced Search)
You can also use Google Search Operators to find external links on a website. It will help you to focus the search on particular domain and combining it with keyword links and external which can help you to identifying external links.
This search will return the pages from example.com that link to the external sources.
Limitations: Google Search Operators will not show all external links specially on the dynamic and large websites.
Method 3: Online Tools and Extensions
There are multiple online tools and extensions available to easily extract all external links from a website. Some popular tools are:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: It will crawl website and help users to filter and export external links. This tool is widely used by the SEO specialist.
- Ahref: It provides a comprehensive view that helps users to view external links on any website by analyzing the backlinks.
- SEMrush: This tool provides a detailed report that include both internal and external links of website. This tool is particularly useful for the competitor analysis.
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth: It is old but reliable tool for crawling website for detecting the internal and external links.
Limitations of Online Tools
Some online tools have limitations on the number of pages they can scrape in free version. They require a paid subscription for more features.
Method 4: Find All External Links of Website with Third-Party App (Recommended)
To get accurate results, it is recommended to use a reliable, secure, and affordable software like the 4n6 Sitemap Generator Software. With this application, you can easily crawl your website and get a detailed list of all external links. This software is very simple to use and completely free from any kind of issues. With this software, you can easily find and check all external links on a website without facing issues.
- Step 1: Download and install 4n6 Website External Links checker tool on your Windows computer.
- Step 2: Run the software on your system and in Crawler tab, enter the URL of the website and click the Crawl button.
- Step 3: Once you click Crawl, the app quickly starts analyzing your website data.
- Step 4: This application will provide you a complete report of your website.
- Step 5: Click on the All External Links option to check out the all external links of a website.
That’s it. This is how you can simply and easily find all external links on a website. If you want to save generated report, you can do it with this software.
Key Benefits of Using Third-Party App
- The software comes up with the very simple graphical user interface for the ease.
- This application and tried and tested to check all external links of a website.
- With this powerful software, it is also possible to check all broken links on website.
- This app is suitable for both small and big websites to check all external links.
- You can easily download and run this powerful software on Windows 11, Windows 10, and below versions.
- This program will give you the status, status code, type, size, and more of your website URL.
Common Questions and Answers
Q: Can I use Google Search Console to find external links on a website?
A: Yes, you can use Google Search Console but it will not give you a full overview of all external links.
Q: What to do if I found the broken external links on my website?
A: If you find the broken external links on your website, please do the following:
- Check if the link page is permanently moved or deleted.
- Use the suggested third-party external link checker to check and fix broken external links on a website.
Conclusion
In today’s write-up, we have covered the topic of how to find all external links on a website. Here, we have explained why and how to identify and check external links on the website. All suggested methods are good. But if you have a large website, then it is suggested to use a third-party app.
