How to Perform a Backlink Audit on Your Website

Environment setup

Create a SEMRush account if you don’t have one already: 

  1. Go to https://www.semrush.com/signup/;
  2. Enter your details and create your account;

Note: If you don’t have a paid account with SEMRush follow this SOP very closely or you run the risk of running out of reports before you are able to complete the SOP. 

Note 2: SEMRush offers a free 7-day trial on all their plans. If it’s your first time using SEMRush and you are only going to perform one audit, a free trial would be enough to perform this SOP. 

Create an Ahrefs account If you don’t have one already:

  1. Go to https://ahrefs.com/;
  2. On the top click ‘Start a 7-day trial for $7’;
  3. Select your plan (unless your website is extremely large the Standard plan works for this SOP) and pay for your trial. 

Note: After the 7 days you will be charged the full cost of the plan, if you have never tried Ahrefs and just want to perform this SOP once, the 7-days are enough for you.

SEMRush – Identify potentially toxic backlinks 

  1. Log in to SEMRush here: https://www.semrush.com/login/
  1. Click “Backlink Audit” on the sidebar → Enter the website that you want to audit → Click “Start Backlink Audit”:
  1. Select “Root domain” (unless you are sure you want one of the other options) → Click “Brand settings”;
  1. Enter all the possible ways (common variations, common acronyms) your brand could be mentioned online → Click “Domain category” 
  1. Select the categories that fit your website → Click “Target countries”:
  1. Select the target countries that fit your website → Click “Start Backlink Audit”:
  1. Your audit will start to process, this might take a few minutes depending on how large your site is. 
  1. When it’s ready, you’ll get a success message, click “Go to results”:
  1. Glance over the ‘Overall Toxic Score’, this will already give you a general idea regarding how spammy the link profile is (and how much work you’ll have to do), the lower the better. → Click “Audit”.
  1. In the top-right corner click “Export to CSV”: 
  1. Open the CSV file in Google Sheets. 
  1. Sort by Toxic Score (Column O)
  2. Analyze each link individually in the “Manual Risk Analysis” columns and that link will be assigned a Risk Score

Note: By default the Risk Score will be calculated as: 

  • Low – If you replied “Yes” to every dropdown; 
  • Medium – If you replied “No” in one of the dropdowns; 
  • High – If you replied “No” to two or more of the dropdowns;

If you want to change the way this score is calculated you can do so by editing the lower and upper boundaries:

Important: Make sure that the ranges do not overlap. 

  1. In the end, it will be up to you to decide whether or not that backlink would be something that you will want to have on your profile, but be mindful of the score you get on the spreadsheet, if there’s a ‘Medium’ risk or higher, you might want to try and remove that link from your link profile. 
  1. For each link select which “Action” should be performed:
    1. Remove: This should usually be the first course of action unless you are sure contacting the owner of the website will have no effect. 
    2. Disavow: This option should be used cautiously and only if across all your profile there is a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links that have caused a manual penalty or are likely to cause one in the future. 
    3. No Action: If you believe the link is not spammy or want to keep it in your link profile, select this option. 

Note: If you want to add a comment, there’s a comment section to the left, and on the right column you’re able to track your progress.  

  1. Column ‘O’ of the spreadsheet will have a metric called “Toxic Score’. The toxic score is a proprietary metric by SEMrush that represents how dangerous that specific link might be for your website. It’s based on a scale of 0 to 100 with 0 being ‘Good’ and 100 being ‘Very Toxic’. → Go through every row of your spreadsheet until you reach a Toxic Score of 45 or below.  

Note: Ideally, you would go through every link on that spreadsheet but if you have little time available and a very large link profile that might not be possible.

Take action on spammy backlinks

  1. For every link with an assigned ‘Action’:
    1. If the action is “Remove”:
      1. Go to the website and try to find the details of the person responsible for its content or a contact form.
  1. Look for a “Contact us”, “Contribute to our blog”, or similar link in the top navigation, sidebar, or footer of the site.
  2. If you find the name of the website owner/editor, try looking for their Twitter profile and check if they have an email listed on their profile.
  3. Use the Mail Hunter Chrome extension. If you are using the free version of Email Hunter, only use this as your last option since you get only 150 requests per month.
    1. Note 1: You might get contact information for the author, but sometimes it will be someone in the company’s marketing team or the website’s webmaster. 
    2. Note 2: Always try to reach out to an actual person instead of a catchall email address (e.g. info@domain.com, marketing@domain.com, hello@domain.com)
    3. Note 3: If there are several contacts, default to the one in which hunter shows the most sources
  4. Use a Whois lookup tool to see if you can find the contact of the owner in the domain registration info.  
  1. Send them a request to remove the link to your site. If you don’t know what to write, you can use the template below: 

Hi, 

This is [Your Name] from [Your Business Name], I’m reaching out because I’ve noticed on this page [Backlink Source] you are linking to [Your Business Name]. 

While we appreciate the mention it would be great to us if you could remove the direct link to our site and replace it with a brand mention, a non-linked URL, or just removing the URL entirely.

Thank you, 

[Your Name]

  1. If the action is “Disavow”: Disavow those links on your site using following the instructions on SOP080 – How to disavow harmful links to clean your backlink profile. 
  1. If the action is “No Action”: Skip to the next URL on your list.
  • Identify 404 (broken) backlinks
  1. Open ahrefs, and enter the site you want to analyze in the box, click the magnifying glass icon, and then click “Broken”: 
  1. Click ‘Export’ → ‘Full export’ → ‘Start Export’ 
  1. On the notification icon, download your exported CSV file when it’s ready
  1. (Optional, might save you time) Make sure those URLs are still 404’ing and remove them from the list if they aren’t, using URLitor.com:
    1. Copy the “Link URL” from column ‘K’ → Paste those lines in the text box → Click ‘Submit’ 
  1. You will get a list of the same URLs and information on their current status, if the URL does not display a ‘404’ you don’t need to analyze it in the next steps and you can remove it from your list.
  1. For each link, select which “Action” should be performed: 
  1. Contact to request fix: Select this option if the reason for the 404 is due to improper linking (i.e. a typo, or a parameter that doesn’t exist) or you think it would be better if they update their page instead. 
  1. Example: https://nomadlist.com/gear)
    Note that the parenthesis ‘)’ at the end isn’t supposed to be part of the link
  1. Redirect: Select this option if you’re going to redirect the currently 404’ing page on your site to another relevant page on your site. 
  1. Example: https://nomadlist.com/chiang-mai-thailand/ and https://nomadlist.com/chiang-mai/ 

Note that the first page is a 404 but it actually could just be redirecting to the new page where that content exists. 

  1. Bring page back: Select this option if you’re going to recreate the content that once was available on that page, or create a similar piece of content. 
  1. Example: https://nomadlist.com/vr/ 

Note that the page used to be a virtual reality tool that is not available anymore. That page’s content can be recreated to mention what happened to the tool, and provide the users with added value. 

  1. Nothing: Select this option if you’re going to take no action on this 404’ing page. 
  1. Example: https://nomadlist.com/default.htm

Even the URL alone doesn’t give us much information regarding why no action will be taken on this page, looking at the links that point to this page it appears to be a negative SEO (Spam) campaign that was pointed towards that URL. Therefore no action will be taken since those links are not valuable and not ‘real’. 

Take action on 404’d backlinks

  1. For every link with an assigned ‘Action:
    1. If the action is “Contact to request fix”:
      1. Go to the website and try to find the details of the person responsible for its content or a contact form.
  1. Look for a “Contact us”, “Contribute to our blog”, or similar link in the top navigation, sidebar, or footer of the site.
  2. If you find the name of the website owner/editor, try looking for their Twitter profile and check if they have an email listed on their profile.
  3. Use the Mail Hunter Chrome extension. If you are using the free version of Email Hunter, only use this as your last option since you get only 150 requests per month.
    1. Note 1: You might get contact information for the author, but sometimes it will be someone in the company’s marketing team or the website’s webmaster. 
    2. Note 2: Always try to reach out to an actual person instead of a catchall email address (e.g. info@domain.com, marketing@domain.com, hello@domain.com)
    3. Note 3: If there are several contacts, default to the one in which hunter shows the most sources
  4. Use a Whois lookup tool to see if you can find the contact of the owner in the domain registration info.  
  1. Send them a request to fix the link to your site, explaining that it will improve their reader’s experience if the link is corrected. 
  1. If the action is “Redirect”: Redirect that page to the desired page (ideally you have written this down in the ‘Comment’ column)
  2. If the action is “Bring page back”: Create the new content that you will be adding to that page. 

Remember: The URL of that page will have to be the same as the URL that is currently 404’ing. 

  1. If the action is “Do Nothing”: Skip to the next one.

Analyze your top linked pages

  1. Open ahrefs, and enter the site you want to analyze in the box, click the magnifying glass icon, and then click “Best by links”: 
  1. Export your data to CSV:
  1. For each link, add comments and actions as needed. You might use the comment section to identify what kind of page it is to spot patterns. For example, which types of pages and content are best at generating links, or you might find some additional actions like ‘canonicalization’ that need to be performed on those pages.  

Example of possible outcomes: 

  • “Tools do especially well for link building” 
  • “Profile pages on Asian locations are linked more than any other locations in the world” 
  • “Spanish websites use us a lot as a reference” 
  • “These URLs are actually the same page they should be canonicalized” 
  1. That’s it! Take those insights into consideration for your next link building campaign and the next pieces of content that you create, if there were SEO issues that you have identified on this section of the website, assign them the right action and follow-up on it.