# Outbound Link Checker

> An outbound link checker reads a page and lists every link leaving your domain along with its rel attribute, split into dofollow, nofollow, sponsored and ugc. It tells you how much link equity the page hands out and flags affiliate or referral URLs that pass equity when Google asks for rel="sponsored".

Source: https://rankcert.com/tools/outbound-link-checker
Free, no signup. Updated: 2026-09-14

## How to use it

1. Paste any page - your own post, or a page you are about to buy a link on.
2. We fetch it once and read every anchor in the HTML, with its rel attribute.
3. Check the dofollow list: those are the sites you are vouching for and passing equity to.

## Questions

### What is an outbound link?

Any link on your page that points at a different domain. Links to other pages on your own site are internal links, which move equity around inside your site rather than out of it.

### Do outbound links hurt SEO?

Relevant outbound citations help - they are a normal part of a well-sourced page and Google has said as much. What hurts is handing dofollow links to sites you would not vouch for, or selling links without marking them sponsored.

### When should I use rel="sponsored"?

On any link you were paid for, including affiliate links. Google's guidance is explicit: paid links that pass equity are a link scheme, and rel="sponsored" is the way to keep the link while declaring the arrangement.

### What is rel="ugc" for?

Links inside user-generated content - comments, forum posts, profile fields. It tells search engines a visitor wrote this link, not you, which limits the damage when spammers find your comment form.

### How many outbound links is too many?

There is no hard cap, but a page handing out dozens of dofollow links to unrelated domains reads as a link farm. Keep the citations that support what you wrote and nofollow or drop the rest.

### Why check outbound links on someone else's page?

Before you buy or swap a placement. A page that already passes dofollow equity to fifty unrelated sites will pass you very little, and a page carrying a site-wide robots nofollow will pass you nothing at all.

### Does this find links added by JavaScript?

No, and that is deliberate. It reads the same HTML a crawler receives, so what you see here is what search engines see. Links that only appear after JavaScript runs are links you should not count on.

### Does an http:// outbound link matter?

It is not broken, but it costs a redirect hop on every click and downgrades the connection before the target upgrades it again. Updating to https is a one-line fix.

## Related tools

- [robots.txt Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/robots-txt-generator): Build a valid robots.txt with your disallow rules, sitemap reference and optional AI crawler blocks, ready to paste at the root of your site.
- [llms.txt Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/llms-txt-generator): Generate an llms.txt file that tells AI answer engines what your product is and which pages matter, in the markdown format the proposal specifies.
- [Schema Markup Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/schema-markup-generator): Generate valid JSON-LD for Organization, SoftwareApplication, Article and BreadcrumbList, ready to paste into your page head.
- [FAQ Schema Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/faq-schema-generator): Turn a list of questions and answers into valid FAQPage JSON-LD, the structured data AI answer engines quote most readily.
- [Meta Tags Checker](https://rankcert.com/tools/meta-tags-checker): Check any page's title, meta description, canonical, robots and heading structure, and see the exact issues that hurt its rankings.
- [Open Graph Preview](https://rankcert.com/tools/open-graph-preview): Preview how your page looks when shared on X, LinkedIn, Slack and Facebook, and find the Open Graph tags you are missing.