Direct answer: Across 10 sites and 36 article pages there are 3,583 links: 3,000 internal (83.7%), 270 external (7.5%), 162 tel:, 116 javascript: and 35 mailto:. The 270 external links point to only 63 unique URLs (23.3%), a 76.7% repeat rate, on 15 external hosts. The median page has 4 external links, and 22 pages have at most 5.
Attributes: 26 external links carry nofollow (9.6%), 199 use target="_blank" (73.7%), and sponsored and ugc are both 0. Another 380 links have no visible text. Five URLs from one site return only a ~1.4 KB JavaScript shell; they are listed separately and excluded from the 36 pages.
Method: page level, not body only
The study reuses the article sample from study 28 (sitemaps of 12 sites, 2–5 URLs each, 46 total) and refetches it serially on 2026-11-03 between 08:40 and 08:41, with at least 0.6 seconds between requests. 41 URLs return 200; five of them are ~1.4 KB shells from one site, leaving 36 pages across 10 sites.
| Item | Rule | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Internal / external | Compared with the final page host, including relative paths | Subdomains count as internal; protocol-relative URLs are parsed |
| External dedupe | Each distinct href counts once | The same URL on many pages still counts each time |
| rel | nofollow / sponsored / ugc counted separately | No judgement of whether the combination is right |
| Link density | Links ÷ visible characters × 1,000 | Visible text excludes script/style and strips tags |
| Shell page | Response < 5 KB | An operational threshold, not a standard |
Key definition: this is a page-level count including navigation, footer, share and filing links, not a body-only citation count. The same template repeats across pages and inflates raw external counts, so the next section looks at deduplication first.
Result: 83.7% internal, 270 external
| Type | Count | Share of 3,583 | Pages (36) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal | 3,000 | 83.7% | 36 |
| External | 270 | 7.5% | 36 |
tel: | 162 | 4.5% | 34 |
javascript: | 116 | 3.2% | 35 |
mailto: | 35 | 1.0% | 25 |
| In-page anchor | 0 | 0% | 0 |
All 36 pages have at least one external link; counts range from 1 to 61, with a median of 4, and 22 pages have at most 5. The two heaviest pages (61 and 33) repeat several recommendation modules in one template.
270 external links, only 63 unique URLs
| Measure | Count | Note |
|---|---|---|
| External links | 270 | Across 36 pages |
| Unique external URLs | 63 | 23.3%; repeat rate 76.7% |
| External hosts | 15 | Includes one malformed http://tel:… address |
| Median external per page | 4 | Range 1–61 |
| Median unique external per page | 3 | — |
Within-site dedupe gives 74 URLs; merging across sites leaves 63, because some external links (such as a filing address) repeat on several sites. One external host appears 120 times, from a recommendation module repeated under every article.
| Site | Pages | External | Unique URLs | Repeat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E03 | 5 | 77 | 31 | 59.7% |
| E06 | 5 | 20 | 3 | 85.0% |
| E09 | 5 | 15 | 3 | 80.0% |
| E14 | 5 | 72 | 18 | 75.0% |
| E16 | 3 | 9 | 3 | 66.7% |
| E19 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0% |
| E22 | 5 | 35 | 4 | 88.6% |
| E23 | 5 | 34 | 7 | 79.4% |
| E26 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 33.3% |
| E28 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 50.0% |
Attributes: little nofollow, many new windows
| Attribute | All links | External only |
|---|---|---|
rel contains nofollow | 173 (4.8%) | 26 (9.6%) |
target="_blank" | 295 (8.2%) | 199 (73.7%) |
rel contains sponsored | 0 | 0 |
rel contains ugc | 0 | 0 |
73.7% of external links open in a new window, but only 9.6% carry nofollow; the study did not count rel="noopener", so it cannot judge safety. 21 pages have at least one nofollow link, concentrated in a few templates.
Empty anchors and link density
- No visible text: 380 (10.6%), on 35 pages; mostly icons, images or share buttons. Whether they are truly unnamed needs the alt/aria merge from study 44.
- Link density: a median of 54.6 links per 1,000 visible characters, up to 138.8. The high value comes from navigation and footer blocks repeated on every page, not from body text.
Five article URLs are only a JavaScript shell
Five URLs from one site return about 1.4 KB of HTML with almost no links or body text. They are not 404s, but for a crawler or a reader without JavaScript they are close to empty. Acceptance should confirm whether such URLs depend on client-side rendering.
What this means for acceptance
- Dedupe by URL before judging external links. The 270 links are only 63 addresses, a 76.7% repeat rate.
- Separate template links from citations. Page-level counts include navigation, footer and recommendation modules, not source citations.
- Check external attributes together. 73.7% open in a new window and only 9.6% carry nofollow; confirm noopener as well.
- Empty anchors still need a name. The 380 textless links should be merged with alt/aria as in study 44.
- List JavaScript shells separately. A 1.4 KB 200 response is not “content”; confirm server rendering or a fallback.
Limits
- Page level, not body level: navigation, footer, share and external modules are included and are not source citations.
- Single snapshot: one fetch on 2026-11-03 08:40–08:41, without a 12/24-hour recheck.
- Regex parsing: no JavaScript; script-inserted links and share widgets are invisible.
- Shell threshold: 5 KB is an operational definition; smaller does not always mean a shell, and the five were spot-checked.
- Sample frame: 10 sites and 36 pages, a pilot, no industry claim.
Data and reproduction
Anonymised data: equipment-article-links-2026.csv (36 rows × 22 columns: link types, target/rel, external dedupe, visible characters, density, status and bytes). The repository keeps docs/research/2026-11-article-links.csv. Raw HTML and fetch records stay off-site and are not deployed.
Parser: scripts/article_link_probe.py; unit tests: scripts/test_article_link_probe.py (10 tests, no network). Run:
python -m unittest scripts.test_article_link_probe
Related: the homepage link structure pilot, the homepage link accessible names pilot, and the article visible date pilot, and the homepage anchor text pilot.
Sources and definitions
- Sample frame: article pages from study 28 (12 sites, 46 URLs); 41 returned 200 here.
- Fetch: 2026-11-03 08:40–08:41 Asia/Shanghai, serial, ≥0.6 s between requests.
- Counts: page-level href types, target/rel attributes, external URL dedupe and visible characters.
- Shell pages: five same-site URLs under 5 KB, listed separately outside the 36.