How to use the Outgoing links report

The Outgoing links report shows you all the links from your target website, subsection, or URL pointing to other websites.

Here are some actionable use cases for this report.

See if you’re linking to irrelevant or unwanted domains

Analyze the websites you link to by sorting the table after the First seen or Linked pages column. If you don’t recall linking to them, remove the link.

For example, we linked to backlinko.com in several posts. This isn’t a website we want to link to, hence we can safely remove it from our articles.

Find links to external non-HTML pages and images

See if a website is linking to other websites with images.

Search for .PNG or .JPG in the Target URL to find the linked websites and pitch your own images instead.

For example, Content Marketing Institute is linking to 163 similar group links. Digging deeper, we found a linked image to buffer.com about buyer personas.

We could ask them to link to our image from our buyer persona article instead.

Find links to redirect chains

Redirect chains can damage user experience as they slow down the page loading speed. They may also complicate your website's internal linking for search engine crawlers.

Trace them without having to run a site audit by filtering for Link type > Redirect.

In our example, it looks like Content Marketing Institute could directly link to their event since they’ve changed the domain for it.

Find outgoing affiliate links

Find out if someone is part of a competitor’s affiliate marketing program.

This works best when you know the exact structure of the affiliate links. But you can also go broad and search for “?” in the Target URL, since most affiliate links have a “?” followed by the vendor’s ID. Then sort by the First seen column.

It looks like the website in question promotes Moosend with an affiliate link when comparing two different email marketing tools.

Compare the number of links to different websites

See if a website has linked to your competitor’s more times than they did to your website.

For example, thedigitalprojectmanager.com - one of the largest resource websites for digital project managers - links to 127 pages from monday.com and only a third to asana.com.

Asana.com could push for more linked pages to increase their visibility on this platform.