Semrush Backlink Audit Tool

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SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool

Hello everyone, so a few weeks ago I did the backlink audit tool, the 14th in the series of the SEMrush toolbox webinar. So the backlink audit tool is a great tool within SEMrush. Where to find the tool, firstly you go to the SEO toolkit, and when you go to link building, you will see the second down is the backlink audit tool, and it will then fetch the projects you are done.

So this project I have is my own website, which is craigcampbellseo.co.uk, and I've already done the scan of the website, so just for speed and stuff like that, and for demonstration reasons I'm going to give you the backlink audit tool with the data that is already there.

Integration to Get More Backlink Data

Now, the first thing I want to talk about, top right here, is integrations. Now to get the best value for money you can integrate your Google search console, Google Analytics and you can also integrate Majestic SEO to make sure you analyze as many backlinks as possible, to make sure your backlinks are where they would must be.

So the reasons youthe backlink would useaudit tool might be to find out what's going on with your website, make sure the links you are getting are the right kind of links, that there is nothing toxic or anything that can damage your business. Now if you are going to perform a backlink audit, you can run the audit, you can export the information as pdf here. So you just click on pdf and it exports everything there to a nice nice pdf if you want to report to someone.

So here's the rundown, I'll just tell you what everything means. So the overall toxic score, according to SEMrush, is average for my website. So I have 995 referring domain names, they analyzed 32,000 backlinks, some are new, some are broken, some are lost, all of these are potential. For the lost, I can reach out again and possibly get those links back. I could also get the broken one back, I can of course keep up with the new one. So that's what that means.

Basically, it gives you the anchor texts, the top anchors here on the right, the top sub-paths through toxic domain names, and it also has track versus don't track, the percentage there too. So these are, when you're building links, you naturally want to look at the anchors, and everything else that's going on there. So it is just a simple dashboard showing you what is happening with your website. The thing that stands out for everyone is domains with a toxic score.

So according to this I have one toxic domain name, one toxic backlink going on. So I want to see what that is. So, it pops up here and shows me that this particular website links to my SEO advice page, the anchor text is SEO advice and the toxic score is 62. Everything below ... so 45 - 59 is potentially toxic, 60 - 100 is poisonous, and everything below is considered a good link.

Now, this particular link, I'm not sure where it came from, who posted it there or whatever it may be. It could have been someone talking about me on a post, or whatever it may be.

The fact that they have used the anchor text as an SEO consultancy is most likely the reason SEMrush is flagging it as potentially toxic. I know this is a good link because I've already checked it out and I'm not going to decline it , but I could possibly remove it.

So when I click the blue button I can delete it, or go to the disavow file, and then I can submit my disavow if I would like to do that. But I'm quite happy with that one so-called toxic link, I'm not going to worry too much about it.

Finding Toxic Links

I also have 101 potentially toxic links. What could this be? There is probably a lot of waste in here, with different toxic scores. Websites I've never heard of, and of course Chinese things happen here too. So there may be no anchor text, it has a toxic score of 55, I could keep it and it will whitelist it, or I can click delete and move it to the decline, and that will add that to my disavow file, which I will come back to later.

So you can work your way through this list and basically scan your links and see what you want to watch. Now there are tons of different filters here so you can group by domain, URL, there are some advanced filters you can check out, toxic marks, so it could be mirror pages, spam on page comments, malicious page, all this kind of thing . You can also filter it by follow and not follow, you can also filter it by toxic, potentially toxic or non-toxic. So you can view all your links there and manage your toxic links as best you can. So that's what the control tab is all about.

Delete now. So anything I want to delete I can add to delete a file. Now that I'm actually adding them to delete the file, I can set up a campaign within SEMrush where I can contact that particular website owner and ask them to remove my link. They may or may not answer me.

In my opinion I would simply decline, but you can send up to 500 emails per day to people via SEMrush by adding things to your delete file here, and you can set up a campaign where 'remove links from your website', this is all preset in SEMrush for you, and you can basically try to scrape their domain name, you can also send them a follow up message asking ... There are templates here, but you can actually edit them and customize them to suit yourself.

So you can basically go in here, and it has the default thing that asks for the link to be removed, and you click send, and it will send it for you via SEMrush, and it will mark it as your e email was sent, whether it was delivered, whether it was read, and whether you received a reply. So it's quite a good thing to use as part of your workforce.

So that's what the Delete tab does, and you can add the website here to work with SEMrush and do that and get in touch and try to remove links. Kind of a long winded way to delete links. It may work for some, it may not work for others. I know people who have reached out and never heard back. So it is entirely up to you which strategy you want to use in the future.

Reject bad links

The next tab is Reject. Everything I added to the rejection file is listed here. Now I can add anything I go through on the control tab to the reject file. This is the disavow file. Now I can use URL search, and I can use some filters here, and things like that. Now you will see that there are already things that I have declined before, the top pair there I have not rejected because I have not updated my disavow file in a few weeks. But this is the disavow file, you just click 'export to TXT' and then you go to your search console and upload that disavow file, and you basically say to google, these links don't count, they are not me, please don't count them on me.

The next tab is lost and found, and what you get out of it is all up to you, but it gives you lost and found ... new and lost domain names pointing to your website, which is something you can then use to contact people that no longer link to you. You're not really going to do much with people linking to you, there is no problem there, but it just gives you lost and found stuff and you can go ahead here and see when the link was first seen. You can see the toxic score, you can mark it as whitelist, you can add it to the rejection if you want to be super active on stuff like that. So, that's what's lost and found, and roughly, it will basically tell you what the tool is about and everything else you need to do.

How often do you deny?

Regular rejection is quite important. I know a lot of people will say they don't, and there are mixed messages. Negative SEO is very real, and keeping track of every trash that points to your website is just good general housekeeping, and I think using this tool to check your links and then create a rejection file will do you good in the future will come in handy.

So I would always recommend that you check out the backlink audit tool on SEMrush. A lot of people don't use it, I don't know why because it's pretty accurate. Obviously it will still point out some links that SEMrush says are toxic, but not really toxic, but I think it's good for you to then manually decide what's toxic and what's not, and make sure that you feel comfortable with the links pointing to your website.

So that's how you use the backlink audit tool, and basically all the features that are there. You can go to the top right corner and there is a user manual and a product tour.

You can also send some feedback if something is missing from the tool, and yes, like I said, use this to report to clients, or whatever you want to do. So it's a great tool whether you're using it to report to clients, or you want to manage your workflow and stay up to date with those toxic links that are going on. So any other questions you can send to SEMrush, and I'll talk to you next time.