External URL redirect broken (4XX or 5XX)

This means that the URL in question is an external URL that redirected to a URL that was not accessible when Sitebulb crawled the website.

Why is this important?

A redirected URL, typically 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) means that the location of the page has changed, and the user is sent from the original URL to a new one. In this case, the user is sent to a page that is not accessible.

This is a bad experience for users and search engines alike, as they will be unable to reach the content.

In the case of the destination URL being 5XX, it might be that nothing is actually wrong, and the server happened to be unresponsive at the time the request was made. However, typically the case is that redirects point at 404 pages, which certainly do need to be resolved.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any external URL which redirects, where the redirect URL returns a HTTP status code of 4XX or 5XX.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

The Hint would trigger for any URL if it returned a 4XX HTTP header response, for example;

HTTP/... 404 Not Found
 
...

Or a 5XX HTTP header response, for example:

HTTP/... 500 Internal Server Error
 
...

How do you resolve this issue?

If a URL is redirecting to a resource that no longer exists, then this needs to be handled in one of two ways:

• Repoint the redirect - if there is another URL which could serve as a replacement, point the redirect to this replacement URL, and correct all incoming links to point to the replacement page.
• Remove the redirect - if you cannot find a replacement resource, remove all incoming links to the redirected URL.

How do you get more data from Sitebulb?

In both the resolution options above, the final stage of the job requires you to find all the links which point at the redirecting URL, and update these.

You can find these by clicking on the blue URL Details button from the URL List, then navigating to Incoming Links.