Off-Page SEO: What It Is and How to Earn Quality Backlinks

Google ranks a page on how well its content answers the search, and also on what the rest of the web says about it. Links from other websites, mentions of your brand and reviews all count. Work on these signals outside your own site is called off-page SEO, or off-page optimisation, and it is the second half of SEO alongside work on the pages themselves. This guide explains what off-page SEO involves today, which link building strategies are safe and how to judge the sites that link to you.

Off-page SEO is everything you do away from your own website to show search engines that it is useful and trustworthy. The core of it is backlinks: links on other websites that lead to your pages. Google’s guide to its ranking systems says that link analysis, including PageRank, is still one of its core ranking systems, although it works very differently from the early days. Links only help if they look and are natural, so a few rules apply:

1. Grow links steadily. Links that come from real marketing, such as content, PR and partnerships, build up over time, and that is the pattern to aim for.
2. Choose linking sites carefully. A link from a respected site on your topic is worth far more than many links from unrelated or low-quality ones.
3. Point links at different pages. Links to the home page, service pages, guides and articles look natural; links to one page with the same keyword anchor do not.
4. Use several methods. Content, outreach, local listings, partnerships and community activity together create a varied, healthy backlink profile.

How much effort links need depends on your competition. In a crowded national market they can decide who ranks; a local business that competes mainly in Google Maps often gets more from reviews and local listings. These are the main ways to get backlinks and mentions.

Paid Links and Sponsored Posts

Link marketplaces and websites that sell sponsored articles are common, but Google’s spam policies treat buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam. A paid link is acceptable only when it is marked with rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”, and then it passes no ranking credit. Unmarked paid links can lead to a manual action for unnatural links. If you pay for a placement, pay for the audience of a relevant site and the visitors it can send.

Outreach

Outreach means contacting site owners, editors, bloggers and journalists with something useful for their readers: a guest article, an expert comment, a resource or a fix for a broken link on their page. It takes more time than buying links, but it builds real relationships and earns links that editors choose to give. It also puts your name in front of readers who match your customers.

Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing means taking part in forums, Q&A sites and online communities on your topic, answering questions and mentioning your website where it genuinely helps. Google recommends that sites mark links in comments and forum posts with rel=”ugc”, so these links usually pass little ranking value. Their worth is in visibility and referral visitors. Register, read the rules and become a helpful member before you share any links; our crowd marketing service covers this work.

Social Media

Most of your customers use social media, so it is a natural place to share your content. Links in posts and profiles bring visitors directly, and content that people see and share on social networks is more likely to be noticed by bloggers and journalists who may link to it from their own sites. Treat social media as a way to spread content and build your brand, and measure it by the visits and enquiries it brings.

Business Directories and Listings

Mass submissions to hundreds of directories used to be a popular tactic, but low-quality directories bring little value today. Genuine listings still matter, especially for local SEO: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yell, Thomson Local, your local Chamber of Commerce and trade associations in your industry. Add your business by hand and keep the name, address and phone number identical everywhere. If local customers matter most to you, see our local SEO service.

Natural Links

Natural links are the safest and most valuable kind. They appear when another site owner decides, on their own, to mention your product, service or business because it is worth recommending. Nobody pays for them and nobody asks for them in exchange.

Such links show that your content is useful and strengthen your reputation with readers and search engines. They are close to outreach links, only without any agreement between the sites.

To earn natural links, publish content worth citing: practical guides, your own research and data, tools and calculators, or clear answers to questions in your field. Taking part in discussions and running events, competitions or local initiatives can also lead to mentions.

Off-page SEO usually follows the same steps:

1. Choose target pages and anchors. Decide which pages need links, such as key service pages and guides, and what anchor text suits them. A natural mix includes your brand name, plain URLs and descriptive phrases, with keyword-rich anchors used sparingly.
2. Analyse your backlink profile. Before building new links, look at the ones you have, using the Links report in Google Search Console and a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush. Find links pointing to pages that no longer exist and redirect those pages, note low-quality or spammy links, and see which pages already attract links naturally.
3. Plan a strategy. Choose the methods that suit your business, make a list of relevant sites and people to contact, and set realistic goals for the next few months. Compare your profile with the competitors who rank for your main searches.
4. Build links gradually. Links that come from content, PR and partnerships grow at a natural pace. Buying a large batch of links at once creates an unnatural pattern and puts the site at risk under Google’s link spam policies.
5. Check the quality of new links. Review your links regularly: check that they are live, that the pages are indexed and that the sites still meet your standards. If many spammy or artificial links point to your site, you cannot get them removed and they have caused or are likely to cause a manual action, Google’s disavow links tool is an option, but Google says most sites will never need it and that incorrect use can harm your rankings.

The best time to control link quality is before a link is placed. Check every site you plan to get a link from against these criteria:

• Real traffic. A site that gets steady visitors from search is useful to people. Tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush estimate organic traffic; a sudden spike or a long decline is a warning sign;
• Topic match. The site should cover your industry, your area or a closely related subject, so a link to you makes sense for its readers;
• Authority. Google does not publish an authority score. Third-party metrics such as Ahrefs Domain Rating or Moz Domain Authority are estimates, useful for comparing sites but not a measure of how Google sees them;
• Signs of spam. Pages packed with ads, large numbers of outgoing links, articles on every possible topic or a “write for us” section full of paid posts suggest a site that sells links. A link from such a site can do more harm than good;
• Visibility in Google. If a site has lost most of its search traffic or its pages are missing from Google, it may have been penalised. Do not use it.

When the strategy is well planned and the links come from good sources, off-page SEO supports the whole business:

• wider awareness of your brand;
• more trust from potential customers;
• growth in organic traffic;
• visitors who arrive directly from the linking sites;
• higher positions in search results.

Yes, but the approach has changed. Google’s Penguin system, announced in 2012 to fight link spam, became part of its core ranking systems in 2016, and Google now uses spam detection systems such as SpamBrain to deal with manipulative links. Bought links and link schemes carry more risk than benefit, and links are only one of many signals Google’s systems use. What works is what would be worth doing even without search engines: useful content, relationships with relevant websites, genuine local listings and an active presence in your community.

Before you pay anyone for link building, ask what methods they use and where the links will come from. If your site has already lost rankings because of links, our article on Google penalties and manual actions explains how to check. To have this work done for you, see our link building service.