External Redirect Broken

What this issue is

You have a URL on your site, often a short link, an affiliate link, a tracking wrapper, or an old vanity path, that returns a 301 or 302 pointing at a URL on a different domain. That is a normal external redirect. This check fires when the destination of that redirect is broken. The user or bot follows the hop off your site and lands on a 404 Not Found, a 410 Gone, a 5xx server error, a domain that no longer resolves, or a redirect that loops back on itself and never settles.

The important distinction is where the break lives. A normal broken internal link ends on a dead page you control. Here the chain leaves your domain first, then dies. You cannot fix the far end, which changes how you handle it. Your only lever is the redirect rule on your side, so the fix is always about repointing or removing your hop, never about repairing someone else's server.

Why it hurts

The user cost is obvious and immediate. Someone clicks a link on a page you own, gets bounced to a dead page on a domain they have never heard of, and blames you, not the partner. That is a bad experience with your brand attached to it.

The SEO cost is quieter but real. Search engines crawl these redirects, and a hop that resolves to an error wastes crawl budget on a dead end. Any equity you were passing through an editorial external link is lost the moment the target 404s, because there is nothing on the other side to receive it. If a large share of your outbound links resolve to errors, it also reads as a low maintenance signal, the kind of neglect that correlates with sites that have stopped being tended. None of this tanks a site on its own, but it is free damage you should not be taking.

How to detect it

• Screaming Frog: after a crawl, open the Response Codes tab and filter to Redirection (3xx), then use the Redirect Chains report to see the final status of each hop. Sort by the last destination status and pull anything ending in 4xx or 5xx. This is the fastest way to isolate external breaks.
• Google Search Console: the Page Indexing report surfaces Not found (404) and Soft 404 entries that Google reached by following links, including redirected ones.
• Server logs: watch for your redirect endpoints firing followed by no successful downstream fetch, or for repeat bot hits on the same short link that never convert to a 200.
• Sitebulb: its redirect and broken link audits flag external targets that resolve to errors and show the full chain.

How to fix it, step by step

1. Confirm the break is live. Curl or load the final destination yourself and record the exact status. A one time blip is different from a permanently dead host.
2. Find the replacement. If the partner moved the page, get the new working URL. If the resource is genuinely gone, decide whether an equivalent target exists.
3. If a valid replacement exists, update your redirect rule to point the hop straight at the new working URL. Keep it a single 301, not a chain.
4. If nothing valid exists, remove the redirect and the links that feed it, or repoint them to a relevant page on your own site so the user still lands somewhere useful.
5. For affiliate and tracking links, check whether the network deprecated the deep link format. These break in bulk when a program changes structure, so fix the pattern, not just the one link.
6. Recrawl and confirm the redirect now resolves to a 200 in a single hop with no loop.

Do this, not that

Triage by final status

FAQ