Update: we’re no longer checking external links

SiteGuru’s broken link checker is one of our most loved features. Today we’re announcing a change to the broken link checker.

Up until now, SiteGuru checks both your internal links (pointing to other pages on the same website) and external links (pointing to pages on other websites). Going forward, we’ll only check internal links. In this post, we’ll explain why, and what this means for you.

What does this mean for me?

SiteGuru can no longer give you a list of broken external links. We’ll still check your internal links, and we’ll keep reporting on internal redirects as well.

If you need to check a website for external links too, we recommend using Ahref’s broken link checker.

Why we’re removing the external link checker

Checking links may seem easy, but it’s actually quite complex. Let me rephrase that: it’s bloody hard. Many sites block crawlers like ours, and this leads to false negatives: we report a link as broken, but in reality, it works. That’s frustrating for you as a user.

We’ve spent a lot of time working around this. We found that it’s almost impossible to get rid of the false negatives. Additionally, the link check takes up a lot of time, causing longer waiting times for your report. And although broken links are annoying, we don’t think they’re a top priority for SEO.

By just checking internal links, we focus on what matters most for your SEO: your website.

Do you have any questions about this change? Just shoot us an email.