© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. In the recent article (Kopteva, Numer Math 137:607¿642, 2017) the author obtained residual-type a posteriori error estimates in the energy norm for singularly perturbed semilinear reaction-diffusion equations on unstructured anisotropic triangulations. The error constants in these estimates are independent of the diameters and the aspect ratios of mesh elements and of the small perturbation parameter. The purpose of this note is to improve the weights in the jump residual part of the estimator. This is attained by using a novel sharper version of the scaled trace theorem for anisotropic elements, in which the hat basis functions are involved as weights.