The POD documentation at http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html states that linking to a website can be done in the following way:
L<scheme:...>
L<text|scheme:...>
Links to an absolute URL. For example, L<http://www.perl.org/>
or L<The Perl Home Page|http://www.perl.org/>
However, POD processing at GitHub only works with the first L<scheme:...> method. The second method results in the href value of the link being http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?${INPUT}.
For example:
Input: L<Google|http://google.com/>
Output: Google
Yeah, annoying. Have you discussed this with the github people?