Has no outgoing links

This means that the URL in question does not have a single outgoing link (internal or external).

Why is this important?

Internal linking is the main way you help users and search engine crawlers discover pages on your website. From an SEO perspective, internal links are the most effective method of indicating to search engines the relative importance of pages on your website.

If you have URLs with no outgoing links, this means that they are unable to pass on link equity to other URLs within the website architecture. As such, they act link a PageRank black hole - they accumulate link equity from incoming links, but don't pass it back out to other URLs on the website.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which does not contain any outgoing internal or external href links.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

The Hint would trigger for any URL which does not include a valid link of the form <a href="URL">. This includes URLs with literally no <a href> links at all, or any of the following;

URL only includes # links:

<p><a href="#test-paragraph">Test</a></p><p id="test-paragraph">Some lorem ipsum dipsum text in here.</p>

URL only includes JavaScript void links:

<p><a href="javascript:void(0);">Test</a></p>

URL only includes mailto links:

<p><a href="mailto:[email protected]">Email Dave NOW</a></p>

URL only includes named anchor links:

<p><a id="#test">Test</a></p>

URL only contains hrefs that are variations of the above:

<p><a href="#test-paragraph">Test</a></p>
<p><a href="javascript:void(0);">Test</a></p>
<p><a href="mailto:[email protected]">Test</a></p>
<p><a id="#test">Test</a></p>

Why is this Hint marked 'Potential Issue'?

This Hint is a 'Potential Issue', which means that it is unlikely to be affecting the site at the moment, but should be investigated as it could cause issues in the future.

At a fundamental level you will want to understand what these pages are and what their purpose is. No one deliberately builds pages without outgoing links if they are intended to rank in the search results. There might be some sort of template or CMS error that means the site navigation is not being included - you may need to discuss with the developer to understand their purpose.

Alternatively, they might provide content that is pulled in by other pages to enhance the user experience, for example, content loaded in via Ajax, or using a modal or iframe. In this case, you may not wish for this content to be crawled or indexed, so you may need to noindex the pages or disallow search engines from crawling them in robots.txt.