A backlink audit is the process of analyzing the quality, quantity, and relevance of links pointing to your website.
So you can build better links and beat your competitors by outranking them in search results.
In this article, we’ll run through a simple backlink audit process you can replicate for your own site.
Note: We’ll be using Semrush’s Backlink Audit, Backlink Analytics, and Link Building Tool for this entire process. Semrush tools have the biggest backlink database on the market.
Let’s get started.
This step is a must. Comparing yourself to your competitors can give you a lot of valuable insights and answer important questions like:
- Do you have more backlinks and referring domains than your competitors?
- What does your link acquisition rate look like compared to your competitors?
- What’s your Authority Score? How does it compare to your competition?
All of this matters.
Because the stronger your backlink profile is, the better you’ll end up ranking in search results. Which can translate to more traffic to your site.
To start your analysis, go to the Backlink Analytics tool. Enter your domain name and click “Analyze.”
In the “Overview” tab, review the:
- Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Referring IPs: To estimate how big your backlink footprint is compared to the competition. Generally, the higher the numbers, the stronger your backlink profile is.
- Authority Score: To determine the quality of your website. This quality is measured on a scale from 1 to 100. The higher the number, the better quality the domain is.
For example, if you notice your link growth is stagnant and your competitors have more backlinks than you, then start building links.
Read our full guide on link building strategies to learn how.
Now that you know how your backlink profile stacks up against your competition, it’s time to dig deeper and analyze each link individually.
Why?
Some backlinks are more beneficial than others. And if you have a lot of low-quality backlinks, they’re not going to move the needle for your site.
Or worse, they could trigger a manual action penalty from Google (meaning some or all of your pages won’t appear in search results). Especially if your site was involved in any link spam (links intended to manipulate organic rankings).
You can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to analyze your backlinks.
First, start a project, configure the tool, and click “Start Backlink Audit.”
Once the audit is complete, you’ll see a detailed report. Like this:
- Overall Toxicity Score: To see whether you have a high score, meaning there are too many low-quality links pointing to your website
- Analyzed Backlinks: To find out whether the number is higher than what you expected it to be, which could indicate a negative SEO attack. In most cases, you don't need to do anything. Google is pretty good at ignoring link-related negative SEO attacks.
- Referring Domains: To see how many domains link to your site. Multiple links coming from a single domain won’t have much impact from a ranking standpoint. The key is to build links from as many unique and relevant domains as possible.
There, you’ll see all the backlinks pointing to your site.
- The URLs: To see whether they come from legitimate websites
- Anchor text: To see whether the anchor text is relevant to the linked page. High-quality backlinks tend to have anchor text that is relevant to the linked page’s content, while low-quality backlinks tend to have unnatural or spammy anchor text (i.e., something random).
- Authority Score (AS) of the linking domain: To gauge the reputability of the linking domain, which impacts your search rankings. A higher AS means a more positive influence on rankings. A lower AS means a less positive impact on rankings.
- Toxicity Score (TS) of the linking page: To measure how potentially harmful the linking page could be. The Toxicity Score ranges from 0 to 100. The lower the TS, the higher the link’s quality. The higher the TS, the lower the link’s quality. You can click on the TS score to see why Semrush considers a particular link as low-quality or bad.
The next step is deciding whether to disavow or remove any bad backlinks.
Google says to do this:
- If you have a significant number of low-quality links built using tactics that are against Google’s guidelines
- If you’ve received a manual action penalty from Google
If you’ve deliberately violated Google’s guidelines and built an influx of links in ways that violate Google’s guidelines, you risk everything in terms of SEO.
You’ll receive an alert in Google Search Console notifying you of a manual action penalty.
You can check for these penalties by going to "Security & Manual Actions," and then "Manual actions" in Google Search Console.
If your website hasn't been issued any penalties, you'll see a green check mark.
Like this:
- Remove: Reaching out to linking websites and asking them to delete links
- Disavow: Disavowing links using Google’s Disavow tool
First, reach out to websites and see if you can get those links removed.
You can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool for this purpose.
Here’s how:
1. Go to the “Audit” tab of the tool and filter for links that have a Toxicity Score of 60 or more. These are likely going to be low-quality, bad links.
2. Check the boxes on the left-hand side. Then, click the “Remove” button, select “Domain” or “URL,” and send them to your “Remove” list.
If the website owners don’t remove the links to your site, disavowing is your remaining option.
To do this, click the “Disavow” button to send your bad links to the “Disavow” list.
Note: Be extremely careful when disavowing links. Disavowing backlinks when it’s unnecessary can severely harm your rankings.
This step is about making sure you recover any links you used to have that you lost.
Building backlinks takes time and effort. So, it pays to reclaim them when you lose them over time.
This happens for many different reasons:
- The author removed your link from the content
- The linking page has been redirected to another page
- The author replaced your link with something else
- The linking page accidentally got deleted
Use Semrush’s Link Building tool to recover your hard-earned links.
First, configure the tool. After that, go to the “Prospects” tab and click on “Lost Backlinks.”
From here, open each link individually. You’ll be able to see information about why your link disappeared.
For example, if it’s returning a 404 error, it could be because the page was deleted.
Then, you could reach out to the website owner and ask them to reinstate the page.
A simple email like this could do the trick:
Hey [Name],
Just came across your ____ page and found it’s broken.
Did you do this on purpose or was it deleted accidentally?
In any case, having a broken page on your website is not good for UX or SEO.
So, I would recommend reinstating the page.
No pressure if you don’t want to do so, though.