External Link Audit Claude Skill
This skill audits a website's external (outbound) links and produces an actionable SEO report. It crawls pages to find broken external links, redirected targets, insecure HTTP links, missing rel attributes on affiliate or sponsored links, unsafe target="_blank" usage, and risky link destinations, then recommends concrete fixes.
Quick Take
Point the skill at a site URL, sitemap, or local HTML folder. It builds an external link inventory, resolves the HTTP status of every target, runs severity-ranked audit checks, and returns a prioritized report with copy-pasteable fixes.
What The Skill Checks
- Broken external links (link rot) and redirected targets, with the exact source page, target URL, and anchor text for each issue.
- Affiliate or paid links missing
rel="sponsored", user-generated content links missingrel="ugc", and insecurehttp://outbound links where the destination supports HTTPS. - Unsafe
target="_blank"usage withoutrel="noopener", generic anchor text on external links, and pages or templates with excessive or sitewide external links.
How The Skill Is Packaged
The skill follows the standard Claude Agent Skill structure: a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and workflow instructions, a references/ folder with the full audit check definitions and report template, and a scripts/ folder with Python scripts that extract external links from the site and check every target. Copy the skill folder into your Claude skills directory and Claude invokes it automatically when a request matches its description.
Skill Files
Every file in the skill is embedded below directly from the Claude-SEO-Skills repository, so you can review exactly what the skill instructs Claude to do before installing it.
SKILL.md
The skill definition: frontmatter, inputs to collect, the five-step audit workflow, and the resources the skill relies on.
Audit Checks Reference (references/audit-checks.md)
Full definitions, severities, and rationale for all nine audit checks the skill evaluates, from broken links to affiliate link compliance.
Report Template (references/report-template.md)
The output structure the skill follows when writing the final audit report.
Link Extractor Script (scripts/extract_external_links.py)
Crawls a live site or local HTML folder within the configured page and depth limits and extracts every external link into a JSON inventory, including anchor text, rel attributes, and placement context.
Link Checker Script (scripts/check_external_links.py)
Resolves the HTTP status of each external target, runs the audit checks against the link inventory, and outputs the structured audit report data.