How to Remove Bad Backlinks Through Semrush

What “Bad” Actually Means in Backlink Terms

Not every low-authority link is a bad link. That’s a distinction worth making upfront.

A bad backlink — in the context of Google’s guidelines — is one that either manipulates PageRank artificially or comes from a source that actively harms your site’s credibility. Think link farms, spammy directories, hacked sites, PBNs with obvious footprints, or domains that Google has already penalized.

What makes Semrush useful here is that its Backlink Audit tool doesn’t just flag “weak” links. It runs each backlink through over 45 toxic markers — things like anchor text manipulation, domain age anomalies, suspicious link patterns, and more — and assigns a Toxic Score between 0 and 100.

A score above 45 is worth investigating. Anything above 75 is almost always something you’ll want to act on.

Setting Up the Backlink Audit Tool

Before any analysis happens, Semrush needs to know what it’s auditing. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up a project for your domain.

Step 1: Create a Project

Head to Semrush → Projects → Create Project. Enter your domain. If you’ve already got a project running, skip ahead to the Backlink Audit section directly from the left sidebar.

Step 2: Configure the Audit

When you first launch Backlink Audit, Semrush will ask you to configure a few things:

• Brand name and variations — This helps Semrush correctly categorize branded anchor text vs. suspicious anchors
• Target countries — Limits the scope to relevant markets, which cuts down noise in the results
• Integrations — Connect your Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts here

The GSC integration is genuinely useful. Semrush will pull in backlink data directly from GSC alongside its own crawl data, giving you a more complete picture. In my experience, the combined dataset catches links that neither source alone would surface.

Step 3: Run the Audit

Hit Start Backlink Audit. Depending on your backlink volume, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to longer for larger sites. Once complete, you’ll land on the Audit dashboard.

Reading Your Audit Results — What You’re Actually Looking At

This is where most guides stop at “red = bad, green = good” and call it a day. That’s not quite enough.

The Backlink Audit dashboard breaks your links into three tabs:

• For Review — Links Semrush has flagged as potentially toxic or suspicious
• Whitelist — Links you’ve manually confirmed as safe
• All Links — The complete backlink pool

The For Review tab is your starting point. Links are sorted by Toxic Score by default — highest risk at the top.

Understanding the Toxic Score markers

When you hover over (or click into) a specific link’s Toxic Score, Semrush reveals the individual markers that contributed to that score. This is where the real analysis happens.

Common toxic markers you’ll see:

• Anchor text over-optimized — Too many links with exact-match money keywords
• Link in footer or sidebar — Sitewide links can look manipulative at scale
• Low-quality website — The linking domain shows multiple spam signals
• Toxic network — The domain is part of an identifiable link network
• Suspicious backlink growth — Sudden spikes in links from a single domain

One marker alone doesn’t make a link dangerous. Semrush’s scoring considers the combination. A link from a sidebar placement on an otherwise clean editorial site isn’t something to worry about. A footer link from a domain showing four other toxic markers? Different story.

Pro Observation: When auditing client sites that had recovered from manual actions, I noticed one pattern consistently: the truly harmful links were rarely the obvious spam domains. They were medium-authority sites — real enough to pass a quick check — that had quietly sold sitewide links in footers or turned into link networks over time. The Toxic Score alone wouldn’t catch them, but the marker breakdown always showed the tell.

The Two Paths: Outreach vs. Disavow

This is the decision most guides gloss over, and it actually matters.

Google’s official guidance (and Semrush’s workflow) recommends a specific sequence: try to get the link removed first, disavow only if removal fails. This isn’t just formality — Google has stated that a properly formatted disavow file is taken seriously, but using it as a first resort without attempted removal can sometimes look like you’re trying to game your own link profile.

Path 1 — Outreach (Requesting Removal)

Inside the For Review tab, select the links you want to remove and click Send to Remove. This moves them to the Remove queue.

From there, you can send outreach emails directly through Semrush’s built-in email tool. It’ll pull contact info associated with the referring domain, where available.

A few practical notes from real outreach work:

• Keep your email short and specific. Mention the exact URL where the link appears. Generic “please remove my link” messages get ignored more often.
• Give it 2–3 weeks. Many webmasters are slow to respond, especially for older content.
• If you get no response after two follow-ups, move on to disavow.

Semrush tracks outreach status per domain — you can see who responded, who ignored it, and which removal requests are still pending.

Path 2 — Disavow

For links where outreach failed (or where the domain is clearly a spam/dead site with no real owner to contact), the disavow path is the right move.

Select the links you want to disavow and click Move to Disavow List. Once you’ve built your disavow list, go to the Disavow tab → Export to Google Disavow format.

Semrush exports a correctly formatted .txt file. This is important — Google is strict about the disavow file format, and a malformed file simply won’t work.

Take the exported file to Google Search Console → Links → Disavow Links tool → Upload the file.

A word of caution here: Disavow files are not instant. Google processes them over weeks, sometimes months. Don’t expect a rankings spike within days of submitting. Also — and this cannot be overstated — never disavow links in bulk without individual review. Accidentally disavowing a cluster of legitimate editorial links has reversed rankings for sites I’ve seen, in a way that took months to correct.

Whitelist Links You Want to Keep

Not everything Semrush flags is genuinely harmful. Some links trip one or two toxic markers but come from real, legitimate sources — a forum thread, a foreign-language directory that’s actually well-maintained, an older web 2.0 that has real traffic.

For any flagged link you’re confident about, click Keep (the green button) to move it to your Whitelist. This removes it from the active audit queue and tells Semrush to stop flagging it in future audits.

This step matters for keeping your audit results clean. If you don’t whitelist confirmed safe links, they’ll clutter your For Review tab in every future audit run, making it harder to spot new problematic links.

Running Re-Audits and Monitoring Over Time

Bad backlinks aren’t a one-time problem you solve and forget.

Once your initial cleanup is done, Semrush lets you schedule recurring backlink audits — weekly or monthly. Any new toxic links that appear since your last audit get surfaced automatically.

This is especially important if your site is in a competitive niche. Negative SEO (competitors pointing spammy links at your domain) is real, and consistent monitoring is the only reliable defense.

The Backlink Audit dashboard also shows a summary trend of your toxic vs. healthy link ratio over time. If that ratio suddenly worsens — a significant spike in new toxic links over a short window — that’s usually a signal to investigate whether a negative SEO campaign is underway.

What Plan Do You Need for This?

The Backlink Audit tool is available across Semrush’s plans — but the scale of what you can audit varies by plan.

SEO Classic Plans (the standard track):

Pro is sufficient for single-site owners doing periodic cleanups. If you’re managing multiple client sites or running audits at scale, Guru’s jump to 300,000 crawl pages per month and 15 monitored sites makes more sense. The Business plan adds API access and migration from third-party tools — relevant if you’re building reporting workflows.

Semrush One (the newer integrated track combining traditional SEO + AI visibility):

Semrush One is positioned as introductory pricing and bundles in AI brand visibility tracking alongside traditional SEO tools. For backlink cleanup specifically, the SEO Classic Plans remain the more straightforward choice — you get the same Backlink Audit functionality at a lower starting price.

If you want to try the tool before committing, both Pro and Guru (and Semrush One’s Starter and Pro+ plans) come with a 7-day free trial — enough time to run a full backlink audit on most sites.

Where People Go Wrong With Backlink Cleanup

A few mistakes come up repeatedly, and they’re worth naming directly:

1. Disavowing too aggressively

The instinct to “play it safe” leads some site owners to disavow hundreds of links that are actually fine. Semrush’s Toxic Score is a starting point for investigation, not a verdict. Always look at the individual markers and use judgment.

2. Ignoring low-toxicity links completely

Links scoring in the 30–50 range are often dismissed. But if you have hundreds of them from the same type of source (say, 300 forum signatures all with the same anchor text), the aggregate pattern can still be a problem. Look at clusters, not just individual scores.

3. Doing a one-time cleanup and walking away

The sites that maintain clean link profiles are the ones running audits on a schedule. A monthly or quarterly audit takes less than 30 minutes once your whitelist is established.

4. Not connecting to Google Search Console

This one’s straightforward. GSC data fills gaps in Semrush’s own crawl, and the combined dataset is meaningfully better. There’s no reason not to connect it during setup.