Off-Page SEO Basics

Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside your own website and still affects how it does in search. You cannot edit it directly, which is what makes it harder, and also what makes it worth something, because neither can your competitors.

What counts as off-page

Mostly it means other websites linking to yours. A link from one site to another is a backlink, and it is the closest thing the web has to a public recommendation: somebody chose to point their readers at you.

It also covers being talked about without a link: mentioned by name, reviewed, listed in a directory, discussed somewhere your audience already is. These do not work the way links do, but a business that exists visibly outside its own website is easier for Google, and for a person, to believe in.

What off-page is not is a numbers game. The single most common beginner mistake is treating backlinks as a quantity to accumulate. It is not how Google weighs them, and a large number of worthless links is not a smaller version of a good link profile; it is a different thing, and sometimes a liability.

The five topics in this section

Read them in order. The sequence goes from understanding links, to earning them, to the two ways this goes wrong.

• What backlinks are and why they matter: what a link actually is, why Google counts it, and why counting them is close to meaningless.
• How to earn backlinks: where real links come from. Google's own advice on this is short and unglamorous, which is why so few people follow it.
• nofollow, sponsored and ugc: how to mark a link you do not vouch for. This is the piece that keeps advertising on the right side of the rules.
• Link schemes to avoid: what Google's spam policies actually say, and how to recognise the same offer dressed up respectably.
• Manual actions and the disavow tool: what happens if it has already gone wrong, and how to check in one minute whether it has.

What to do first

• Publish something worth citing. Every legitimate route to a link starts here, and there is no shortcut past it.
• Claim the places your business already belongs: a directory in your industry, a professional body, a supplier's customer list. These are not favours; you qualify for them.
• Tell the people who would genuinely care. Not a mass email: the handful of people whose readers would actually want the thing you made.
• Mark any link you were paid for with rel="sponsored", starting today.
• Check Search Console's Manual Actions panel once, so you know whether you are recovering from something or simply starting.

Notice what is not on that list. There is no tool to buy, no monthly package, and no volume target. Off-page SEO is slow in a way that the rest of this section will not make faster.

Sources: Google Search Essentials and Spam policies for Google web search.