SEMrush Backlink Checker

Analyzing your backlinks before bed is about as important as washing your dick before a one-night-stand. How do they work? What are they? You should know this already – they’re the links that lead back to your site. They’re located on every website except for yours. They’re your inward traffic. How did they get there, though? Who knows. Maybe you paid someone for a referral. Perhaps you commissioned a blog post to try and get some traffic for your content. There are many ways to get quality backlinks. But, the point of this review isn’t to talk about how to get backlinks, necessarily. It’s more about handling them on a larger scale.

SemRush’s backlink checker is a tool you mostly use after you’ve already established yourself on the web with an over-arching presence. Once you’ve got hundreds if not thousands of backlinks, that’s when you need this tool. Now, I don’t know whether you’ve gotten the memo, but the quality of your backlinks influences the ranking of your site. All of your inter-linking, both outward and inward is one giant network that Google looks at as a sort of organic creature that may or may not be due for a mercy kill, depending on the quality of the links.

To that end, SemRush has created this amazing backlink checker that’s sure to help you get to the bottom of your overall link network’s quality.

The Basics of Backlinks

We can talk about outward links in another review. They’re very important as well, but they’re not covered by this tool for one simple reason – outward links are all on your site. You can analyze them locally and run a scan with a manual script if you want. You could be done in a second. You don’t need to scrape the web. Backlinks are the complete fucking opposite and they’re a nightmare to get your hands on. Getting a comprehensive list of all your backlinks should ideally be impossible. They’re out there on the internet. They could be anywhere. Hell, they could be hosted on a local network for all you know. Everyone’s free to link back to your site.

But, let’s not forget the most important lesson here. The whole point of analyzing your backlinks is to improve your SEO. In 99.99% of all cases, when someone says SEO, they really just mean Google. I mean, fappers use DuckDuckGo when they want to find the real OG smut, but other than that, we’re mostly just talking about Google. So, when you’re analyzing your backlink network, you only have to worry about the sites that Google can hash. And, if Google can hash them, that means they already have. That’s how their indexing system works.

Now, imagine you’ve scraped every single site that Google’s hashed and checked for links leading back to your sites – that’s what SemRush’s tool does, essentially. If a site is hashable by Google, that means it’s also hashable by third-party tools. That’s what makes this system possible. That being said, you can’t do the scraping yourself. I mean, theoretically, it is possible, all of those sites are publically available. But, you don’t have the time or computing power. Leave it to SemRush.

How Bad Backlinks Happen

Any website that in any way violated Google’s terms of service is flagged by Google as, well, bad. Google’s very authoritarian about these things. If they see a site that they don’t like, they flag it. More precisely, they give it a low rating. It’s not like they straight up blacklist sites unless they’re doing something illegal. Assuming you’re only working with reputable websites, you won’t get on any blacklist. But, even with perfectly legal sites, Google can be very liberal with the low ratings. They’re very strict and their rulebook changes way too often for you to expect everyone to keep up. Shit changes, rules get deadlier and your overall site’s ranking plummets. Note, this is not because you’re doing something wrong, necessarily. You could be on top of your game, but if the sites hosting your backlinks are tanking, your rating suffers as well.

Then, there’s also the issue of backlinks that you are not personally responsible for. Like I said – anyone’s free to link back to your site. It’s an open internet, right? So, what if a ton of people that you do not want to be associated with start spamming links to your site all-over the goddamn internet? Well, the second they start posting about your website on sites with a shitty reputation, your reputation suffers as well. It’s a fucking shit show. It’s also the kind of problem that is impossible to address manually. You need a scanning tool that is constantly on the lookout for backlinks. That’s exactly what SemRush’s backlink checker is for.

Fighting Back Against Bad Backlinks

So, you’ve gotten the tool, you’ve run a scan and you know where the nasty backlinks are. What do you do next? Well, you’re free to submit a list to Google to disavow any backlinks from entire sources that you do not want to be associated with. This functions kind of like a block button. It’s your way of telling Google that a long list of websites do not belong to you, are not associated with you and most importantly, are not endorsed by you. That way, if you’re ever targeted by someone shady, whether intentionally or by chance, you can just give them the finger.

On the flip side, there’s also the chance that your own network of websites starts plummeting in rating and here, disavowing will not do. They’re your websites. You can’t just disavow your own websites; it makes no sense. If this happens to you, start sifting through the data. You should consider all of your money-making sites as main and all other websites as secondary. Go through your main websites first and make sure they’re on the rise, then scan outward.

Check every single website under your network for underperforming links and figure out why they’re considered poor by SemRush’s tool. Keep in mind that there’s no such thing as a bad backlink under your own network, technically. It’s more so that your sites are compromised. You need to figure out why, stat. There could be an entire chain of backlinks that are compromised because one of the websites under your network is being flagged. Sometimes you might even need to shoot an entire site in the head, if it becomes a backlink tumor. Only do that if the situation is hopeless, though.

Pricey Pricing

This tool is free for 7 days. That’s nice. But, you have to enter your credit card information. After the first seven days, it starts to cost a whopping $100 a month. Under this package, you get 3 projects, 500 keywords and 100,000 pages to crawl. There’s also the option to export your findings in a neat little PDF. I like the offer, but I’m not jazzed about the price. I’d be happy if there weren’t this many artificial limitations tacked on. You know they’re only doing this for the money. I’d rather wait a day to get my results than be limited to a certain number of keywords. That’s just arbitrary blockage.

There’s also a Guru plan that literally costs double, at $200 a month. With this one, you get three times the usage, literally. Fifteen projects, 1,500 keywords, 300,000 pages to crawl. You get the gist of it. This tier also comes with a content marketing platform, multi-targeting and historical data. I’ll admit, this offer’s a lot more enticing. It feels like you get a lot more bang for your buck. But, I suspect that a small-time webmaster wouldn’t be able to afford this package. I also don’t think you’d get your value out of it if you’re running a small-time operation.

The whole point of macro-managing your backlinks is to avoid manually going through a gigantic expansive link network. If you’re small fry, chances are you don’t have that many links to go through. So, should you consider getting SemRush’s backlink checker? Well, that’s up to you, honestly. I trust the name behind the tool, as they’ve been in the business for over a decade. They’ve also been on top of the SEO industry ever since day one. I know that they know what they’re doing. So, you have to weigh the pros and cons and consider whether you even need your backlinks checked or not.