Link Health: a beginner's guide
Check broken links and redirect chains
Link health: why broken links cost you more than annoyance
Link health is the umbrella term for whether the links on a website — both the internal ones (links from one page to another within your site) and the external ones (links to pages on other sites) — actually still work. A link is "healthy" when clicking it lands on a real page that returns an HTTP 200 status. A link is "broken" when it returns 404 (page not found), 410 (gone), 500 (server error), or redirects through more than one hop before reaching its destination.
You should care because broken links cost you more than just visitor annoyance. They cost you trust (visitors who hit a 404 are noticeably less likely to keep browsing), they cost you SEO (Google notices broken internal links and treats them as a quality signal), and they cost you crawl budget (every fetch of a broken URL is a page Google could have spent on real content). For e-commerce sites, a broken link to a discontinued product is a lost sale. For content sites, a broken link in the middle of a popular post is a credibility hit that compounds with every future visitor.
The five things every link-health audit looks at:
Internal links that 404. These are usually the result of a page being renamed or deleted without updating the links pointing to it. They are also the easiest to fix.
External links to dead pages. Other websites disappear, change domains, or restructure — and any links you have to them quietly rot. The web is constantly losing its own footnotes.
Redirect chains. A link that goes from A → B → C → D adds latency, dilutes link equity, and is treated as a small negative signal by Google. Redirects should always be one hop.
Mixed-content links. On an HTTPS page, a link to an HTTP resource can trigger a browser security warning. These are silent disasters.
Anchor text quality. Links labeled "click here" or "this page" carry less SEO weight than links with descriptive anchor text. This isn't a brokenness issue but it shows up in any serious link audit.
Three questions a link-health audit answers:
How many broken links are currently on my site, and which pages do they live on?
Which broken links are on my highest-traffic pages and need immediate fixes?
Are there any redirect chains slowing my pages down or wasting Google's crawl budget?
The cost of ignoring link health is the slow accumulation of dead-ends and trust hits across an entire website. A site with no broken links feels professional in a way that's hard to articulate. A site with dozens of broken links feels neglected, even when the content itself is excellent. A quarterly link audit catches this drift while it is still cheap to fix, and is one of the easiest content-quality wins on any website.
The Link Health endpoint, in plain language
In one sentence: Check broken links and redirect chains
Checks the health of links on a page including broken links, redirect chains, anchor text quality, and link attribute analysis. Identifies issues that hurt SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and user experience.
Don't worry if some of the words above are still unfamiliar — there's a plain-language glossary at the bottom of this page, and most of the terms link to their own beginner guides if you want to learn more.
What is actually happening when you call it
Here's what's actually happening behind the scenes when you call this endpoint:
Crawls the target page, extracts all internal and external links, then checks each link's HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) status. Reports broken links (4xx/5xx), redirect chains with hop counts, link attributes (nofollow, sponsored, ugc), and anchor text quality (generic, empty, or descriptive). Returns a health score with actionable recommendations.
If you're using an AI assistant through MCP, you don't need to understand any of the technical details — the assistant calls the tool and translates the result for you.
Why this specific tool matters
Let's skip the marketing fluff and answer the only question that actually matters: why should you, a real human with a real to-do list, care about the Link Health tool? Here's the plain-English version, written the way you'd hear it from a friend who happens to do this for a living.
Broken links damage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings, user experience, and credibility. Redirect chains dilute link equity and slow page loads. Regular link health checks prevent these issues from accumulating.
Picture this in real life. Imagine an SEO specialist. Here's the situation they're walking into: Scan pages for broken internal and external links that return 404 or 5xx errors. Without the right tool, that person would be stuck copy-pasting between five browser tabs, reading documentation written for engineers, and crossing their fingers that the answer they cobble together is correct. With the Link Health tool, the same person gets a clear answer in seconds — no spreadsheets, no guessing, no waiting for someone on the infrastructure team to free up.
Three questions this tool answers in plain English. If any of these have ever crossed your mind, the Link Health tool is built for you:
Are search engines actually able to crawl, understand, and recommend my pages?
What is the single biggest fix I could make today to climb in Google?
How does my site compare against the technical SEO checklist that the top results all pass?
You can either click the tool and get the answer yourself, or ask your AI assistant — connected through MCP (Model Context Protocol) — to ask the question for you and translate the answer into something you can paste into Slack.
Who gets the most out of this. Marketers, content writers, freelancers running client sites, founders trying to grow without paying for ads, and SEO specialists running monthly health checks. If you see yourself in that list, this is one of the EdgeDNS tools you should bookmark today.
What happens if you skip this entirely. Skip it and search engines quietly stop sending you traffic and you don't find out until the next quarterly review. That's why running this check — even once a month — is one of the cheapest forms of insurance you can give your domain.
Available on the developer plan. The technical details: `GET /v1/domain/link-health`.
When would I actually use this?
If you're still on the fence about whether the Link Health tool belongs in your toolbox, this section is for you. Below you'll meet three real people — an SEO specialist, a web developer, and a content manager — facing three real situations where this tool turns a stressful afternoon into a five-minute task. Read whichever story sounds closest to your week.
Story 1: Broken Link Audit
Imagine you're an SEO specialist. Scan pages for broken internal and external links that return 404 or 5xx errors.
Why it matters: Fix broken links before they impact search rankings and user experience.
Story 2: Post-Migration Validation
Imagine you're a web developer. After a site migration, verify all links still resolve correctly and redirect chains are minimal.
Why it matters: Catch link issues introduced during migration before they impact traffic.
Story 3: Content Quality Check
Imagine you're a content manager. Audit anchor text quality across the site to identify generic or empty link text.
Why it matters: Improve internal linking with descriptive anchor text for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Common situations across teams. Beyond the three stories above, here are the everyday workplace moments when people across the company reach for the Link Health tool — or one of the tools right next to it in this category. If any of these are on your calendar this month, that's your sign:
Before launching a new page, site, or campaign — to catch the dumb mistakes.
During a quarterly SEO health check.
When organic traffic suddenly drops and you need to find out why.
When pitching a new client and you need an audit deck in under an hour.
If you can see yourself in even one of those bullets, the Link Health tool will pay for itself the first time you use it.
Still not sure? Here's the easiest test in the world. Open Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other AI assistant connected to the EdgeDNS MCP server and ask, in your own words: "Is the Link Health tool useful for my job?" The assistant will look at the tool, ask you a couple of follow-up questions about what you're trying to accomplish, and give you a straight answer in plain English. No commitment, no signup forms, no jargon.
The easiest way: just ask your AI assistant
If you've connected the EdgeDNS MCP server to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, or any other AI assistant, you don't need to write any code. Just ask in plain English:
"Use the Link Health tool to check example.com and explain anything that looks wrong in plain language."
The AI will figure out which tool to call, fill in the right parameters, run it, and then explain the result back to you. No copy-pasting between tabs. No reading raw JSON. No memorizing endpoint names.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) access is free on every plan, including the free tier. One API key works for both REST and AI — you do not have to choose.
The technical way: call it from code
If you're a developer and want to call the endpoint from a script or your own application, here's the simplest possible example. Replace the placeholder API key with the real one from your dashboard.
# Replace edns_live_YOUR_KEY with your real API key from the dashboard
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer edns_live_YOUR_KEY" \
"https://api.edgedns.dev/v1/domain/link-health?domain=example.com"What you need to provide
You need to provide 2 pieces of information when you call this tool. The table below lays them out side by side, with a real example for each one so you can see exactly what to send.
| Field | Type | Required? | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
domain | string | Yes | The domain to check link health for | example.com |
limit | number | Optional | Maximum number of links to check (1-200, default: 50) | 50 |
What you get back
When you call this tool, you'll get back a JSON object with the fields below. If you're talking to it through an AI assistant, the assistant reads these for you and explains them in plain language — you don't need to memorize them.
| Field | Type | What you'll see in it |
|---|---|---|
domain | string | The checked domain |
summary | object | Total, broken, redirected, healthy, and timeout link counts |
brokenLinks | array | Broken links with status codes and anchor text |
redirectChains | array | Redirect chains with hop counts and status codes |
linkAttributes | object | Counts of nofollow, sponsored, ugc attributes |
anchorText | object | Anchor text quality analysis |
score | number | Link health score 0-100 |
grade | string | Letter grade A-F |
breakdown | object | Per-component score breakdown with weights for broken links, redirects, anchor text, empty anchors, nofollow ratio, internal/external balance, and status distribution |
recommendations | array | Specific link fixes to implement |
Words you might be wondering about
If any words on this page felt like jargon, here's a plain-language version. Click any linked term to read a full beginner-friendly guide.
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) — The language web browsers and websites use to talk to each other.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — Everything you do to help search engines like Google find, understand, and rank your website.
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