External links

On the External links page, there is a list of broken external links that lead to your site from other sites. The Yandex robot regularly checks if external links are available and valid.

Information about broken external links is presented in a table and may include:

  • The URL of the page that has a link to your site.
  • The resource's SQI.
  • The URL of the page that the link leads to.
  • HTTP status — 4xx and 5xx (if the HTTP status of the pages changes, the information about them will disappear from Yandex Webmaster after a while).
  • Link text on the resource.
  • The date when the Yandex robot found a link on the resource.

Note

If a large number of external links appear in the list, it doesn't affect the site status in the search, unless you use techniques aimed at deceiving search engines. To remove links to your site from a resource, contact the owner of this resource or its hosting provider.

Viewing information

By default, the data in the table is sorted by SQI. You can sort the list of broken links by the date of link discovery or using filtering.

To find the resource with the largest number of links to the site, enable the Group by site option.

Note

Up to 200,000 external links can be displayed for one site.

Data filtering

You can quickly find information about a page using filters. To do this, click the icon. You can filter data by all available parameters. For example, you can use URL filtering:

Enter part of a URL

Allows you to make a list of links with a certain text in their address. Select the Contains value from the list and specify the desired fragment in the field.

Use special characters

Allows you to use special characters to match the string by its beginning or substring and set more complex conditions using regular expressions. To do it, choose URL matches from the list and enter the condition in the field. You can add multiple conditions by putting each of them on a new line.

For conditions, the following rules are available:

  • Match any of the conditions (corresponds to the “OR” operator).
  • Match all conditions (corresponds to the “AND” operator).

Characters used for filtering

Character

Description

Example

*

Matches any number of any characters

Display data for all pages that start with https://example.com/tariff/, including the specified page: / tariff / *

Using the * character

The * character can be useful when searching for URLs that contain two specific elements or more.

For example, you can find news or announcements for a certain year: /news/*/2017/.

@

The filtered results contain the specified string (but don't necessarily strictly match it)

Display information for all pages with URLs containing the specified string: @tariff

~

Condition is a regular expression

Display data for pages with URLs that match a regular expression. For example, you can filter all pages with address containing the fragment ~table\|sofa\|bed repeated once or several times.

!

Negative condition

Exclude data for pages with URLs starting with the following string: https://example.com/tariff/: !/tariff/*

The use of characters isn't case sensitive.

The @,!, ~ characters can be used only at the beginning of the string. The following combinations are available:

Operator

Example

!@

Exclude data for pages with URLs containing tariff: !@tariff

!~

Exclude pages with URLs that match the regular expression

Questions and answers

Your robot tries to download my site pages using broken links. Why?

The robot takes links from other pages, which means that one of them contains broken links to your site. Perhaps you changed the site structure and the links on other sites became broken.

Why does the robot request non-existent pages/subdomains on my site?

Probably the robot found links to them somewhere and tried to index them. Non-existent subdomains and pages should be unavailable or return a 404 error code. This way the robot will index only the useful pages of your site.

There are links to my site from low-quality sites

When developing ranking algorithms, we tried to minimize the possibility that the site indexing or ranking is influenced from the outside. If you don't want users to use such links to come to your site, please contact the owners of the sites that contain these links, or the hosting providers on whose servers these sites are located. If the links are removed, information about them disappears from Yandex Webmaster automatically.

The number of incoming links to my site has increased dramatically

The indexing bot monitors changes on sites. When new links to your site appear on any pages, this information will be displayed on the Broken links → External links page in Yandex Webmaster.

The page no longer contains a link to my site, but it's displayed in Yandex Webmaster

Links are displayed in Yandex Webmaster as long as they are stored in the search engine database. If links to your site are already removed from some pages, then information about them will automatically disappear from Yandex Webmaster over time. This happens as the robot re-indexes the pages where the links were previously located.

There is a link to my site, but it isn't displayed in the service

The link may not be displayed in Yandex Webmaster if:

  • The page where the link to your site is located is unknown to the robot.
  • The link can lead to a non-primary mirror of your site: using a different protocol (HTTP or HTTPS), with or without the www prefix.
  • If the resource contains several links to the same page of your site and the link text is the same, Yandex Webmaster displays only one of these links.
  • The link is formatted as text, meaning it isn't a clickable hyperlink (for example, www.yandex.com).
  • The link doesn't point directly at your site, but links via an intermediary page with a redirect (including a link from a social network).
  • The link was very recently added to the page. The robot hasn't indexed this page yet.
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