Has outgoing links with malformed href data
URLs that contain at least one outgoing anchor link which has malformed href data.
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 a link is malformed, this means that link equity will not be passed through to the link target, as the link itself is invalid. It may also mean that crawlers are unable to find the destination URL, so crawling, indexing and ranking may all be affected.
It may also result in a poor user experience, if users are unable to navigate to the destination page.
What does the Hint check?
This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which contains at least one outgoing anchor link which has malformed href data.
Examples that trigger this Hint:
Any of the example links below would trigger the Hint.
An anchor with only one /
An anchor with an extra :
An anchor with a mis-spelt protocol
How do you resolve this issue?
Identify the anchors which use a malformed href, and correct each one on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the specific issue, you may be able to fix a number of pages at once, if the problematic link is used in a template for lots of pages on the website.