Destinations that refused an automated request - 401, 403, 429 or a timeout. Almost always bot protection rather than a broken link, so it is reported for transparency and deliberately excluded from scoring.
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- No AI in the score986 deterministic rules
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How this rule is weighted
- Importance
- 1 / 10
- How much this matters relative to other rules.
- Confidence
- SPECIFICATION
- A standard says so: HTML, WCAG, an RFC or Google's own documentation.
- Severity
- info
- How the finding is presented when it fails.
- Scoring
- Excluded
- Reported in the report, never penalised.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.
What produces this finding
Built at scan time by link resolver, not from our static registry. That engine evaluates its whole rule set in one pass, so this check cannot be run on its own — it runs as part of a scan.
Questions about this rule
- Does SEO_LINKS_UNVERIFIED affect my score?
- No. It is a detection rule: it runs, appears in your report and never penalises you. "Links our checker could not verify" is information about the page rather than a defect - most pages are not expected to satisfy it.
- What does SPECIFICATION confidence mean?
- A standard says so: HTML, WCAG, an RFC or Google's own documentation. Confidence is a declared tier rather than a per-rule number, so every rule backed by the same class of evidence carries the same weight - which is what makes the score reproducible instead of hand-tuned.
- How do I check SEO_LINKS_UNVERIFIED on my own site?
- This rule is produced by link resolver during a scan. link resolver evaluates its whole rule set in one pass, so this check cannot be run on its own - run the SEO checker and it is included.
Tags
- seo
- links
- detection
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