External links
The External links page contains examples of links to your website from other resources. It includes the links from pages known to the robot. However, some links might not be displayed on the page.
The Yandex robot regularly checks if external links are available and valid. Depending on the results of such checks, the following information may be displayed:
- The URL of the page that has a link to your site.
- Link text on the resource.
- The URL of the page that the link leads to.
- The date when the Yandex robot found a link on the resource.
- The date when the link's information was last updated.
This information allows you to track new links and identify broken links. In addition, you can generate a report only for removed links and find out the removal date.
If the pages that contain the links are no longer included in the search results and aren't available to the Yandex robot, the information about them will disappear from Yandex.Webmaster after a while. This will happen as the information about them is updated in the robot's database.
Viewing information
By default, the sorting is based on the date when the links were found or removed. You can also sort data by the SQI indicator.
To find:
- Broken links
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Turn on the Use only non-working option. URLs that respond with an HTTP code other than 200 OK (for example, 404 Not Found) are considered invalid.
- Resource with the largest number of links to the site
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Turn on the Group by site option. By default, the data is sorted by SQI, you can sort it by the number of links, as well as by the date the link was detected or deleted. For example, by the last detected.
If the list contains a lot of links, you can filter the links you want to track.
The found external links can be downloaded in the archive (it contains the TSV file).
Data filtering
You can filter the link list by the following parameters using the icon. For example, you can filter links by the URL of the referring resource or by relative address of your site pages. To do this, click the icon next to theSource or Destination parameter and choose a value from the list:
- Match any of the conditions (corresponds to the “OR” operator).
- Match all conditions (corresponds to the “AND” operator).
Allows you to make a list of links with a certain text in their address.
Allows you to use special characters to match the beginning of the string or a substring, and set more complex conditions using regular expressions. You can add multiple conditions by putting each of them on a new line.
For conditions, the following rules are available:
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: 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: |
@ | 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 pages with URLs starting with https://example.com/tariff/: !/tariff/* |
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: 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: |
@ | 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 pages with URLs starting with 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 pages with URLs containing tariff: !tariff |
!~ | Exclude pages with URLs that match the regular expression |
Operator | Example |
---|---|
!@ | Exclude pages with URLs containing tariff: !tariff |
!~ | Exclude pages with URLs that match the regular expression |
Reasons why some links might not be displayed in the section
The following reasons may explain why some links are not shown:
- 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.example.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.
FAQ
- 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.
The robot takes links from other pages, which means that one of them contains broken links to your website. You probably changed the website structure and the links on other websites became broken.
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.
The link may not be displayed in Yandex.Webmaster if: