Outbound Link Checker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.