Analyze the health and score of your backlinks

Your backlink profile is a record of who trusts your site enough to link to it. Before going live — and regularly after — you should know what that record looks like.

The main tool for this is SEMrush's Backlink Audit. It pulls your current backlink profile, assigns toxicity scores to individual links, and flags anything that looks spammy or potentially harmful. Running this before launch gives you a baseline — you want to understand your starting point before you start actively building links.

What a healthy backlink profile looks like: most links come from relevant, real websites. A mix of blog posts, resource pages, industry directories, and occasional homepage links. The anchor text is varied — not every link uses your target keyword as anchor text, because natural linking patterns don't optimize for exact-match phrases.

What a problematic profile looks like: many links from sites with no traffic, no editorial content, or no clear purpose. Link farms. Comment spam. Directories that exist only to sell links. These links don't help you rank, and if Google decides to act on them, they can hurt.

In SEMrush Backlink Audit, you can mark suspicious links for disavowal. This generates a disavow file you upload to Google Search Console, telling Google to ignore those links when evaluating your site. Use this carefully — disavowing legitimate links by mistake has real consequences for your authority score.

Before going live: run the audit, check the overall toxicity score, and investigate any links flagged as Toxic or Potentially Toxic. For a new site that hasn't done active link building, most links will be clean. For a site inheriting an older domain with history, this check matters more.

After going live: run the audit monthly or quarterly as part of your regular SEO review. New toxic links can appear over time. Some competitors try to damage rival sites by pointing spam links at them — negative SEO is rare but real, and catching it early limits the damage.

Use this check alongside your Google Search Console review. GSC tells you how Google sees your content; the backlink audit tells you how Google sees your credibility. Both matter for ranking. If you don't have SEMrush, Ahrefs offers a comparable audit tool — either way, meaningful backlink analysis requires a paid account.