Inbound link optimization
Semrush’s link management tools offer guidance at every stage of the link building and link testing process. In this work, you’ll learn how to identify potentially harmful links and find new opportunities to build high-quality links.
Let’s start by checking your link profile.
Link Check – Check your link profile
Link Inspection offers a thorough job of checking your links, analyzing factors related to suspicious links, sending emails to website owners, and creating a disavow file to send to Google in severe cases.
Configure link checking
To get started, you’ll need to create a link testing campaign. You can set up a campaign for an existing project or create a new one if you don’t have one yet:
Setting up link checking tools can be done in four simple steps.
In the first step, you will need to choose the scope of your test:
We recommend choosing the main domain option, as it is the most comprehensive option and allows you to analyze a wider range of links to your domain. If you choose to track only the “www” version, you will be limited to links specific to that subdomain.
The following three steps are optional:
- Brand Name – Add a brand name that you use in your business, marketing, and advertising to identify your product, service, or concept. If you have translated your brand name into other languages, add them here as well.
- Domain Categories – Select topics related to your domain. This data simplifies the process of identifying dangerous links and allows us to provide more accurate results.
- Target Countries – Select countries that are relevant to your target audience. This data will help us understand if links are coming from countries that are not relevant to your site.
Review your links
Once you have the tools set up, go to the Audit tab to start checking your links:
Initially, all of your links will be in the For Review group. This group is considered your portfolio – the links you are currently reviewing. Here in the table, you will see the Source and Target URLs, Anchor, Authority Score, Toxicity Score, and Page Actions.
All links are ranked by Toxicity Score. This metric measures the risk of a particular link using a 100-point scale, from 0 (not suspicious) to 100 (highly suspicious). It is based on a complex formula, which takes into account toxic signs found for each link. You can check the toxic signs for each link:
We recommend connecting Google Search Console and Google Analytics. for your campaign. The GSC connection will sync the links in real time with your link analytics in Semrush. The GA connection gives you information about the traffic coming from your links and can improve some of your toxic spots so you can avoid removing valuable links that are driving real traffic to your domain.
After you’ve clicked on a link, in the Actions column you can choose an action for the next step in checking your links:
- Post a link on the guy’s list if you find it valuable.
- Move it to the removal list.
- Move it to the rejection list.
As part of the tab, you’ll find the Profile Insights feature at the top left of the page. It offers tips and insights about your domain’s link profile. You can find it on any page within the link inspection tool.
Click the Show Insights link to see actionable tips and insights. Each flagged issue includes a brief explanation of what the issue is and its relevance to you, followed by a Review button. Clicking the Review button will take you directly to a report, graph, or feature within the Link Inspection tool, where you can see and investigate the issue for yourself.
Contact us to remove unwanted links
After your investigation, you may find that a specific link or group of links is the reason your site received a manual action. You can contact the site owner and request that the link be removed—especially before using the disavow tool.
The Remove list in the Link Inspection tool allows you to build a contact list of links that you want to manually contact and request removal or no-follow.
This process only works if you have an email address to contact for the domain linking to you. To add your email address, use the Add button:
Create a rejection list
Sometimes a domain owner won’t remove a link that you know is negatively impacting your SEO. In a serious case like this, you may want to use the disavow function. Disavowing links asks Google not to consider these links when ranking your domain (although there are no guarantees).
To disavow your unwanted links, you will need to upload a properly formatted .txt file to Google’s disavow tool. The disavow report in the Link Inspection tool helps you prepare a file with all the links you want Google to ignore.
Once you’ve completed your disavow list, you’ll see a green button on the top right that says “Export to TXT.” When you click the export button, Semrush will convert your disavow list to a .txt file in the correct format. You’ll then need to head over to the Google Disavow Tool to upload the file. As Google says, disavow links should be done with care.
Please note that the link checker cannot itself check whether you have uploaded the file to Google’s disavow tool or not. To confirm that you have disavow the links, click Done in the message bar at the top of the report. These links will be given a disavow status, and Semrush will recalculate the Toxic Score for the project.
Learn more in the link checking guide .
Now, let’s go out and look for new opportunities for quality links to your domain.
Link Building – Find New Opportunities
A link building tool compiles a list of link building opportunities for your domain and provides you with an interface to manage a link outreach campaign.
Set up the link building tool
Go to the link building tool, start a new project or create a new campaign for an existing project.
The setup process includes two steps:
1. Select your database and enter up to ten keywords you need to improve your ranking for:
2. Add up to ten competitors whose link profiles you think are worthy of emulation.
When you are done, click the “Start Link Building” button.
Review link building opportunities
Once your campaign is set up, start checking your opportunities in the Prospects tab.
In the Opportunities report, the link building tool will break down all the collected opportunities by their corresponding sources.
- All opportunities – All domains that are listed as opportunities in your campaign.
- Keywords – Domains we found ranking in organic search for the keywords you entered during the setup process.
- Competitors – Domains that send links to competitors that you entered during the setup process.
- Manually uploaded – Domains that you manually uploaded to your campaign.
- Broken Links – Domains that used to link to your site, but now the links are lost (data taken from the link checker tool)
Review the opportunities and select the ones related to your site and move them to the In Progress tab using the “To in progress” button opposite the opportunity link.
To help you choose, there are Authority Score and Evaluation metrics. Expanding the evaluation function shows the quality of that link, as well as the relevance and health of the domain.
Connect your email account and send your inquiry.
The In Progress tab allows you to reach out to selected opportunities and monitor the status of each of your potential links.
Please note that in order to apply for an opportunity, you must add an email address using the “Add” button at the top of the page.
Your opportunities’ email addresses are automatically added by Semrush. If the email address field is empty, try these steps or this method to find an email address before moving on to the next opportunity.
In the Monitor tab, you can track the progress of your link building efforts over time. All of your potential links are marked as active , lost , broken , undefined, or rejected after you add the domains you want to track to this corner of the tool.
Learn more about link building tools.
Once you purge toxic links and gain new quality links with our tools, how can you check that your strategy is working?
Link Analysis – Compare your website against your competitors.
The best way to quickly review your website’s link performance is to compare it against your competitors. With our link analysis tool, you can dig deep into each domain’s link profile and perform a side-by-side comparison of up to five websites.
Simply enter a domain in the search bar to start analyzing its link profile. In the Overview tab, you will get a complete overview of the link profile of the domain being tested. At the top of the review report, you will see fields for entering additional domains for comparison:
Tip: Go to the Competitors tab in the Link Analysis report to find more competitors. If you need to compare metrics for more than five sites at the same time, our Bulk Analysis tool allows you to compare up to 200 domains (subdomains/subfolders/URLs) at once. If you need to compare link profiles and find gaps, use the Backlink Gap tool.
The metrics in the Overview tab provide insights into your competitors’ link building strategy. Pay attention to:
- Authority Score – Our proprietary metric for use in measuring the overall quality of a website (or URL) and its impact on SEO.
- Number of Referring Links/Domains – Shows the size of the link profile.
- Referring domains by Authority Score – shows the quality of the link profile.
- Monthly Visits – Shows the estimate of monthly visits worldwide.
- Organic Traffic – Shows the estimate of organic traffic the site receives each month.
These metrics and charts should give you an idea of how successful your strategy is and how your website stands out from the competition.
Learn more in the link analysis guide .
Apart from that, you can use link analysis to do in-depth research on your or one of your competitors’ link profiles. For more information and tips, check out our blog: 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of SEO Link Building with Semrush, How to Perform the Skyscraper Technique to Get High-Quality Links.