Malformed Link URLs

What This Means

One or more <a> elements in the page have href attribute values that cannot be parsed as valid URLs — for example, broken template variables ({{url}} instead of a URL), URLs with unencoded spaces or special characters, or completely invalid strings.

Why It Matters for SEO

Malformed URLs cannot be followed by browsers or crawlers. They represent broken links that cannot ever reach their intended destination. They are error-level issues because they are always a bug — either a template rendering failure or a content entry error that went undetected.

What the Platform Checks

The platform attempts to parse each href attribute value as a URL. Fires when a value cannot be parsed as a valid absolute or relative URL.

How to Fix It

• Identify the source of each malformed URL — content body links (look at the raw CMS content) or template-generated links (look at the template code).
• For unresolved template variables: find the template file and fix the variable reference.
• For user-entered content: correct the URL in the CMS content editor.
• For special characters: ensure URLs are properly encoded (spaces → %20, or use valid URL-safe characters).