Trying to figure out how to use Semrush’s network graph effectively? Well, you’re in the right place, because I’m going to walk you through how this powerful visual tool can totally change how you look at your website’s and your competitors’ backlink profiles, internal linking, and even content strategy. Think of it like this: instead of sifting through endless spreadsheets, you get a clear, interactive map that shows you exactly who’s connected to whom, what those connections mean, and where your biggest opportunities or risks! lie.

Semrush is a beast when it comes to SEO and competitive intelligence. It’s got over 50 tools designed to help you with everything from keyword research to site optimization and performance tracking. But sometimes, all that data can feel a bit overwhelming, right? That’s where the network graph comes in. It takes complex relationships, like backlinks or internal links, and turns them into an easy-to-understand visual story. We’re talking about a comprehensive suite that processes over 20 billion keywords and analyzes 808 million domains, giving you insights that are actually actionable.

By the end of this guide, you’ll not only understand what Semrush’s network graph is, but you’ll also know exactly how to use it to boost your SEO, find killer link-building opportunities, and even spot potential issues before they become real problems. We’ll look at how Semrush pulls all this data together, how accurate it generally is, and where else you might find these kinds of visual insights across the platform. So, let’s get into it and turn those complex connections into clear strategies!

Table of Contents

What Exactly Is a Network Graph?

Before we dive into the specifics of Semrush, let’s just chat for a second about what a network graph even is. It’s a pretty universal concept, not just for SEO. Basically, a network graph is a fancy way to show relationships between different “things” or “entities”.

Imagine a bunch of dots and lines. The dots are what we call “nodes” or “vertices” – these are the individual entities. In our world, that could be websites, specific pages, people, or even keywords. The lines are called “edges” – these represent the connections or relationships between those nodes. For example, if website A links to website B, that’s an edge. If website B links back to website A, that’s another edge, and it could be one-directional or bi-directional.

These graphs are super helpful because they let you visualize how everything is interconnected. You can quickly see who the most influential players are bigger dots usually mean more connections, find groups or “clusters” of related entities, and even spot gaps where connections are missing. This visual approach beats looking at raw data any day, making complex structures much easier to understand.

Semrush’s Network Graph: A Backlink Powerhouse

Now, let’s talk about where Semrush truly shines with its network graph: the Backlink Analytics tool. You’ll find this gem typically in the “Overview” or under its very own “Network Graph” tab within Backlink Analytics. Mastering SEO with Semrush: Insights from Nick Eubanks

What does it do? This color-coded network is designed to give you a quick, visual understanding of a domain’s relevancy and link-building power. It shows you the most important referring domains for any website, going up to three tiers deep. That’s right, not just who links to you, but who links to them, and even who links to those links!

Understanding the Visuals: Nodes, Colors, and Tiers

When you punch in a domain and look at the Network Graph, you’ll see a constellation of dots and lines. Here’s how Semrush breaks it down:

Nodes The Dots: Each dot represents a referring domain. The bigger the dot, the higher its Authority Score, meaning it likely has more backlinks and is trusted by Google. Smaller dots are less authoritative.
Edges The Lines: These are the actual backlinks connecting the domains.
Colors – The Key to Insights: This is where it gets really interesting and helps you save a ton of time.
- Green: These are your superstars! Green dots indicate domains that are highly relevant to your niche. If you see a lot of green, it means the site has a reputable network of backlinks.
- Gray: These domains are relevant, but maybe not as tightly niche-specific as the green ones. They’re not bad, just less intensely focused.
- Red: Pay close attention here. Red dots or clusters can signal potentially dangerous or suspicious links, possibly even pointing to a link farm or a private blog network PBN. Spotting these early is crucial for maintaining your site’s health.
Tiers: Semrush doesn’t just show you direct links. It goes deep:
- First-tier: These are the domains directly linking to the website you’re analyzing. Semrush looks at up to 12 of these.
- Second-tier: These are sites linking to your first-tier referring domains. Semrush analyzes up to 10 of these for each first-tier domain.
- Third-tier: These link to your second-tier domains. Semrush checks up to 8 of these per second-tier domain.

This means the graph can potentially show you connections to up to 960 websites 12x10x8 in the network. That’s a massive amount of data presented in a digestible way!

Why is this Network Graph a Game-Changer?

Honestly, the Network Graph saves you a ton of time and helps you make smarter decisions. Here’s what you can do with it:

Quickly Gauge Link-Building Power: With a quick glance, you get a bird’s-eye view of a domain’s overall backlink profile and its strength. Is it reputable, relevant, moderate, or suspicious? Semrush tells you right at the top.
Find Niche-Relevant Link Opportunities: You can instantly identify domains that are highly relevant to your niche the green dots!. If these sites are linking to your competitors but not you, that’s a golden opportunity for outreach.
Uncover Second and Third-Tier Opportunities: Ever thought about getting links from sites that link to your backlinks? Or your competitors’ backlinks? The Network Graph helps you find these indirect prospects. These are often overlooked but can be incredibly powerful.
Detect Harmful Link Schemes: Spotting red clusters is like a flashing warning sign for potential PBNs or manipulative link schemes. This helps you avoid bad neighborhoods or disavow toxic links pointing to your own site. A lower Authority Score on a linking domain, combined with an unnatural anchor text, can signal a low-quality or bad link.
Analyze Competitor Strategies: By plugging in a competitor’s domain, you can quickly see their most relevant referring domains. This allows you to understand their link-building strategies and find new targets for your own efforts.

It’s about seeing the quality and relevance of links, not just the sheer number. You don’t need to spend hours combing through endless data tables. the graph gives you that full impression in seconds. Ubersuggest vs. Ahrefs vs. Semrush: Which SEO Tool Rules in 2025?

Beyond Backlinks: Other Powerful Semrush Graphs

While the Backlink Analytics Network Graph is a standout, Semrush uses various other graphs and charts across its platform to visualize complex data. These are just as crucial for making informed decisions.

Traffic Analytics: Visualizing Your Audience’s Journey

When I’m trying to understand a website’s overall performance, the Traffic Analytics reports are where I spend a lot of time. This tool provides deep insights into a competitor’s website traffic, showing you things like the number of visitors, pages per visit, bounce rate, and average visit duration. It even breaks down traffic sources, helping you see where competitors are focusing their efforts.

You’ll see different types of graphs here:

Traffic Trend Graph: This line graph shows how a domain’s traffic and engagement metrics change over time. It’s super helpful for spotting seasonal trends, analyzing the impact of marketing campaigns, or understanding if traffic spikes are due to something specific.
Traffic Channel Distribution: This chart breaks down where a site’s traffic comes from – direct, referral, organic search, paid search, organic social, paid social, email, and display ads. This quickly shows you a competitor’s marketing focus and helps you identify over or under-utilized channels for your own strategy.
Traffic Journey: Sometimes, you’ll see flowcharts that visualize where users came from before visiting a domain and where they went after leaving. This offers a fascinating look into user behavior and potential partnerships.

How does Semrush calculate traffic anyway? That’s a question I get asked a lot! Semrush’s traffic estimations are pretty sophisticated. They use a proprietary algorithm that combines data from several sources, including keyword rankings, search volume, click-through rates CTR, and, importantly, clickstream data. They partner with third-party data providers who collect anonymized internet usage data from millions of users. Unlocking Market Secrets with Semrush Market Analysis (MA): Your Ultimate Guide

The formula generally looks something like: Traffic = Visibility * Click-through Rate CTR * Search Volume.

Visibility refers to how often a website appears in search results for relevant keywords.
CTR is the estimated percentage of users who click on a link based on its position in search results.
Search Volume is the average number of searches for a specific keyword.

It’s important to remember these are estimates, not Google’s actual analytics logs. While they might not perfectly match your Google Analytics or Search Console numbers which measure actual clicks to your own site, Semrush’s data is highly valuable for competitive analysis and understanding market trends. Semrush aims for high accuracy, boosted by its large keyword database and machine learning algorithms. They even claim their keyword volume data is 32.39% closer to Google Search Console numbers compared to other tools.

Site Audit: Mapping Your Internal Links

Your website’s internal linking structure is like its circulatory system – it helps search engines crawl your site and users navigate it. A strong internal linking strategy also passes “link juice” and helps establish page importance.

Semrush’s Site Audit has a fantastic “Internal Linking” report that uses graphs to visualize this crucial aspect.

Internal Link Distribution Graphs: These graphs show you how links are spread across different types of pages on your site. You can easily spot “orphaned pages” pages with zero or very few internal links or pages that are overloaded with links.
Pages’ Crawl Depth Graph: This visual tells you how many clicks it takes to reach different pages from your homepage. Google generally prefers important pages to be reachable within three clicks, so this graph helps you identify pages that might be buried too deep.

The Site Audit also uses something called Internal LinkRank ILR, which measures the importance of your pages based on their internal link architecture. The closer a page’s ILR is to 100, the stronger it is in terms of internal linking. This helps you optimize your internal linking to strengthen weaker pages and improve crawlability. Unlocking Client Trust: Your Guide to the Semrush Client Portal

Topic Research: Visualizing Content Clusters

For content strategists, Semrush’s Topic Research tool is a goldmine. It helps you find content ideas and organize them into “topic clusters” or “content clusters”. What’s a topic cluster? It’s basically a pillar page a broad, comprehensive piece of content that links out to multiple, more specific “cluster pages” that cover related subtopics, all interconnected with internal links. This structure helps Google understand the breadth and depth of your expertise on a subject.

When you use the Topic Research tool, especially if you select the “Mind Map” view, you’ll see a visual representation that acts like a network graph of related topics and questions. This kind of graph helps you:

Identify Core Topics and Subtopics: You can easily see the main topic your potential pillar content and all the surrounding subtopics your audience is searching for.
Spot Content Gaps: By mapping out what you and your competitors cover, you can identify areas where you’re missing content that your audience is actively seeking.
Organize Your Content Strategy: The visual clusters make it simple to plan your content, ensuring you cover a topic comprehensively and create a strong internal linking structure.

AI-first search world, it’s not just about keywords. it’s about entities and relationships. Semantic clustering, where you build content around clear entities, attributes, and relationships, helps Google’s Knowledge Graph understand who you are and what you offer. The visual nature of Semrush’s topic research supports this by helping you see those connections.

How Semrush Gathers Its Data

It’s natural to wonder how a tool like Semrush gets all this data and how accurate it is. After all, you’re basing important business decisions on these insights! M4uHD Review: Is This Free Streaming Site Safe, Legal, or Worth the Risk?

Semrush relies on a blend of its own sophisticated technology and partnerships with third-party data providers.

Massive Databases: Semrush maintains huge databases of keywords over 20 billion!, domains 580 million, and backlinks trillions of them.
Web Crawlers: Like search engines, Semrush has its own web crawlers that continuously scan the internet, discovering new links and updating its backlink database daily. This is crucial for keeping backlink data fresh.
Clickstream Data: For traffic analytics, Semrush partners with third-party clickstream data providers. These providers collect anonymized browsing data from millions of internet users across various countries. This data gives Semrush insights into actual user behavior, including visits, bounce rates, and traffic sources across different channels direct, referral, social, etc..
Machine Learning Algorithms: All this raw data is then fed into Semrush’s proprietary machine learning algorithms and neural networks. These algorithms analyze patterns, identify discrepancies, and model estimations like keyword search volume, keyword difficulty, and estimated traffic to present the most accurate information possible.
Ranking Data: Semrush also tracks keyword rankings for millions of keywords across numerous regions and search engines. They analyze the top 100 website rankings in SERPs to provide accurate keyword data.

Data Accuracy and What to Expect

No third-party tool can give you 100% perfectly accurate, real-time data like Google Analytics or Search Console can for your own website. Those tools have direct access to your site’s data. However, Semrush’s data is widely considered highly dependable for competitive analysis and market research.

Traffic Estimates: While they are estimates, they provide a very valuable benchmark and show clear trends. You should use Semrush’s traffic graphs for direction and comparison, understanding how you stack up against competitors, and identifying overall market trends.
Keyword Data: Semrush continuously updates its keyword database and employs sophisticated algorithms to ensure accuracy for search volume and keyword difficulty.
Backlink Data: Daily updates and a massive database mean you’re getting some of the freshest backlink data available, allowing you to audit profiles and find opportunities with confidence.

The key is to use Semrush’s data for strategic insights and comparison, and always validate critical information for your own site against your direct analytics tools.

Putting Network Graphs to Work for You

So, you’ve got this awesome visual tool. How do you actually use it to make a difference in your SEO and marketing? Mangools SEO Review: Your Go-To Tool for Smarter SEO?

1. Competitive Backlink Analysis & Link Building

This is probably the most common and impactful use case.

Identify Your Competitors: Start by identifying your top organic competitors using Semrush’s Organic Research Competitors report or the Market Explorer.
Plug Them In: Go to Backlink Analytics, enter a competitor’s domain, and navigate to the Network Graph.
Spot Niche-Relevant Links: Look for large green dots. These are highly authoritative and relevant sites linking to your competitor. Can you get a link from them? These are prime outreach targets.
Uncover “Hidden” Opportunities: Click around on the second and third-tier domains. You might find relevant sites that link to your competitor’s backlinks, but not directly to your competitor, or you. These can be easier targets for your link-building efforts because they’re already in a related network.
Analyze Link Quality: The colors quickly tell you about the overall health of their backlink profile. If you see a lot of red, you know to steer clear of those types of links, and it might even signal a shaky foundation for your competitor’s rankings.
Track Link-Building Trends: In the Backlink Audit, you can also track trends in referring domains, which can reveal aggressive link-building strategies by competitors or highlight consistent growth patterns.

2. Auditing Your Own Backlink Profile

The Network Graph isn’t just for spying. it’s also vital for keeping your own site healthy.

Check for Toxicity: Input your own domain into the Backlink Analytics Network Graph. Look for any red clusters. These could be toxic backlinks that are harming your SEO. You’ll want to investigate these and potentially disavow them through Google Search Console.
Assess Relevancy: See how many of your backlinks are green or gray. A high percentage of green indicates a strong, relevant link profile, which is great for SEO.
Find Internal Link Weaknesses: Using the Site Audit’s Internal Linking report, identify orphaned pages or areas where link juice isn’t flowing effectively. This helps you improve user experience and crawlability.

3. Refining Your Content Strategy

While not a “network graph” in the same visual sense as backlinks, the Topic Research “Mind Map” view works on similar principles.

Build Comprehensive Content: Use the mind map to identify all related subtopics for your core theme. This ensures you’re creating thorough, valuable content that covers your audience’s questions.
Identify Content Gaps: Compare the topics you cover with what’s present in the mind map, or even analyze competitor content using these insights to find areas you’ve missed.
Plan Internal Linking: As you create content clusters, consciously plan your internal links to create a strong, semantically rich network that Google’s Knowledge Graph will love.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the primary purpose of the Network Graph in Semrush?

The primary purpose of Semrush’s Network Graph, especially within Backlink Analytics, is to visually represent the relationships between a domain and its referring domains, including second and third-tier links. It helps you quickly understand the relevancy, authority, and potential toxicity of a website’s backlink profile, making complex link data easier to interpret for competitive analysis and link building.

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How does Semrush determine the “relevancy” of links in the Network Graph?

Semrush determines relevancy by analyzing various factors, including the Authority Score of the referring domain, the number of outgoing links it sends to the target website, and crucially, how many outgoing links it sends to other domains. Domains with a higher Authority Score, a relatively high number of links to the target site, and a relatively low number of links to other, unrelated domains are considered more relevant, often categorized as “green” in the graph.

Can I use Semrush’s Network Graph to identify link farms or PBNs?

Yes, absolutely! The Network Graph is designed to help you quickly spot potentially harmful link schemes like private blog networks PBNs or link farms. If you see large clusters of “red” dots, or connections to domains with low Authority Scores and a high Toxicity Score, it’s a strong indicator of an unnatural or manipulative linking pattern that you should investigate further or avoid.

How accurate is Semrush’s traffic data compared to Google Analytics?

Semrush’s traffic data provides valuable estimations based on a sophisticated algorithm, keyword rankings, search volume, click-through rates, and extensive clickstream data. While these estimates are highly dependable for competitive analysis and understanding market trends, they will likely not be 100% identical to your own Google Analytics data. Google Analytics offers real-time, precise data for your website because it’s directly integrated, whereas Semrush relies on aggregated and modeled data for any website. Use Semrush for strategic insights and comparisons, and your direct analytics for exact performance metrics of your own site.

Are there other “network-like” graphs or visualizations in Semrush outside of backlink analysis?

Yes, Semrush uses various graphical representations across its tools to simplify complex data. For instance, the Site Audit tool features graphs for Internal Linking, showing link distribution and crawl depth to visualize your site’s architecture. The Topic Research tool has a “Mind Map” view that visually clusters related topics and questions, helping you organize content ideas and identify semantic relationships. The Traffic Analytics also uses trend graphs and channel distribution charts to visualize audience behavior and traffic sources. Mastering the Semrush Local SEO Exam: Your Ultimate Guide

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