How to Verify Your Backlinks with Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Have you ever thought about backlink verification? You have a lot of backlink data from Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, and other SEO tools. But how to check if they really live and exist?

Check if your backlinks are active! Here’s how to check with Screaming Frog’s custom extraction feature:

• Switch to List Mode: Launch Screaming Frog and select ‘List’ mode.
• Set Custom Extraction: Navigate to ‘Configuration’ > ‘Custom’ > ‘Custom Extraction’.
• Input XPath Rules: Enter the following XPath expressions to extract the desired data:

1//a[contains(@href, 'example.com')]/@href
2//a[contains(@href, 'example.com')]
3//a[contains(@href, 'example.com')]/@rel

1. //a[contains(@href, 'example.com')]/@href. => Extractor 1 - Link
2. //a[contains(@href, 'example.com')]. => Extractor 2 - Anchor
3. //a[contains(@href, 'example.com')]/@rel. => Extractor 3 - Link rel attribute

• Upload Your Backlinks: Load your list of backlinks. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz are perfect for compiling this list.
• Start the Crawl: Run the crawl and watch the results.

On the attached screenshot, out of 280 backlinks, 270 are active 🟢