(and totally sorry, didn't mean to comment hijack... just admin worries that I broke something 😅 . I think it's that markdown expects the http,https at the front)
Link addresses to remote sites must start with either the protocol (e.g. "http://") or a double slash.
Otherwise your browser will prepend the current hostname and, in the case of relative addresses, the current path. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24028561/ddg#24028813 for a discussion of absolute vs relative addresses.