Invalid URL Format in Links: Common Causes and How to Fix Them

What is this warning?

A link on the page has an href that cannot be parsed as a URL, even after resolving it against the page address. Browsers and crawlers can't follow it, so it behaves like a broken link. It is usually caused by an empty host, an illegal character in the domain, an invalid port, or a template variable that never got filled in.

How to Fix This Issue

How to Fix It

What bseoa flags

bseoa resolves each link's href against the page URL, the same way a browser does, and then parses the result using the WHATWG URL rules. If parsing fails, the link is reported as an invalid URL format. Relative links such as ../pricing are resolved first, so they are not flagged by this check.

Links that fail to parse

<!-- empty host -->
<a href="https://">Pricing</a>

<!-- space inside the domain -->
<a href="https://exa mple.com/pricing">Pricing</a>

<!-- port out of range -->
<a href="https://example.com:99999/pricing">Pricing</a>

<!-- unclosed IPv6 literal -->
<a href="http://[2001:db8::1/status">Status</a>

<!-- template placeholder that was never rendered -->
<a href="https://{{ site_domain }}/pricing">Pricing</a>

Where these come from

CMS fields or rich text editors where someone typed or pasted a URL by hand.
Templates that build absolute URLs from a variable that is empty or unset in one environment.
Client-side templates (Handlebars, Vue, Angular) whose placeholders are visible in the raw HTML before JavaScript runs.
Copy-paste from documents that bring along non-breaking spaces or other invisible characters.

How to fix it

Replace the href with a complete, valid URL, or with a root-relative path for internal links:

<a href="https://example.com/pricing">Pricing</a>
<a href="/pricing">Pricing</a>

If the invalid URL comes from a template, fix the variable at the source and add a fallback so an empty value can't produce https:// with no host. If the placeholder only exists before JavaScript runs, render the link on the server, or crawl with JavaScript rendering enabled (--spa) to confirm what users and Googlebot see after rendering.

A related mistake that is not flagged here

<a href="www.example.com"> without a scheme is valid, but it is treated as a relative path and resolves to https://yoursite.com/current/www.example.com, which usually returns a 404. bseoa's broken-link checks catch those when the crawl requests the resolved URL.

Why this matters

A link that can't be parsed passes no link equity and sends no one anywhere. On navigation or footer templates, one bad href is repeated on every page of the site. To find every broken and invalid link across a site in one report, see the broken links report.