Base URL malformed or empty

This means that the URL in question contains a base URL which is malformed or empty.

Why is this important?

The base tag is used to determine the URL base for all relative links used within a page. If the base tag is malformed or empty, this may cause problems for search engines crawling relative links.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any internal URL that contains the base tag, where the base URL is empty, or malformed in some way.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

Consider the URL: https://example.com/page-a

The Hint would trigger for this URL if it had any of the following;

Empty base URL:

<base href="">

OR Base URL with invalid protocol:

<base href="htttps://example.com">

This will also trigger for other examples of the base URL being malformed, such as the base URL containing white space.

How do you resolve this issue?

To resolve the immediate problem, simply fix the base URL on any URLs that are affected. However, we also recommend that you should not use relative URLs at all (see further reading below).

Further reading

• Why relative URLs should be forbidden for web developers
• Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs?