What Off-Page SEO Actually Is
Off-page SEO sits outside the website fence. The narrow definition is link building. Links remain an important ranking factor, so off-page SEO is an important part of SEO. But an expansive definition embraces promotional activity outside the website, including press exposure and links (with or without nofollow) and brand awareness campaigns that can involve publishing on other sites and newsletters.
Google's John Mueller acknowledged the importance of links when he said: "Links are really important for us to find content initially. So it's like if nobody links to your website ever then we're going to have a hard time recognizing that it even exists." But Mueller has also said that one shouldn't be creating links: "You shouldn't be creating links to your site in general. I'd recommend checking out our webmaster guidelines for more."
Off-page SEO matters because a website lacking citations from other sites resembles a site that's not worth crawling and indexing. It provides forward momentum to a site by helping it rank higher for more keyword phrases. But approached realistically and with the clear eyes of a pragmatist, it's possible to navigate an off-page SEO strategy that keeps within the narrow boundaries defined by Google—and makes more money.
Why Citations Matter for Discovery
A website lacking citations from other sites resembles one not worth crawling and indexing. Because off-page ranking factors, like links, measure how important a site is, failure to attain any links may very well contribute to stagnant search traffic. It's not unlike having a car with no gas. The most accurate description of what makes off-page SEO important is that it provides forward momentum to a site by helping it rank higher for more keyword phrases.
Google's Take on Links, Authority & Domain Authority
Do links help build authority? While SEO pros like to think about abstract concepts such as website authority in connection with links, Google doesn't actually have any kind of metric that corresponds to authority. Google often says that it strives to rank authoritative content. But that word is generally used in the context of the quality of the content itself—not as a standalone ranking factor that flows to the webpage and imbues it with "authority."
Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller debunked the idea that Google uses an authority metric. He stated it clearly: "In general, Google doesn't evaluate a site's authority. So it's not something where we would give you a score on authority and say this is the general score for authority on your website. That's not something we would be applying here."
Do links build domain authority? Another false notion about links is that they help to build domain authority. The concept of domain authority has roots in the early days of SEO when Google still displayed the PageRank values for webpages. What was plain to see was that sites with high PageRank scores tended to rank better than sites with lower PageRank scores. The home pages of those sites contained the highest PageRank scores. So, it was understood (at the time) that domains with high PageRank scores ranked better. Because domains with high PageRank scores were considered authoritative, it was easy to say that they were authoritative domains. Anyone could see the PageRank scores and how domains with high PageRank were ranked higher than those with less PageRank. That led to a belief in the concept of "domain authority." But Google never actually used any kind of domain authority metric. The concept of domain authority was simply a loose idea based on what could be visually confirmed. Eventually, Google adjusted how webpages are ranked so that the PageRank scores played less of a role in deciding what pages ranked highest. Relevance then began to play a larger role in determining what pages were ranked. It took more than PageRank to get a page to rank and the proof, once again, was in the search results themselves. One could see that webpages with low PageRank scores were ranked ahead of webpages from sites with higher PageRank. But the idea of domain authority persisted. Articles that insist Google uses domain authority never cite any patent, research paper, or statement by a Googler to back up those claims (because no official confirmation exists). In a Reddit AMA, Google's John Mueller answered the question of whether domain authority exists with a witty response: "Of course it exists, it's a tool by Moz."
Three Link-Building Strategies Google Condones
In its SEO Starter Guide, Google's documentation explicitly condones promoting a website by telling others about it. Here's what Google published about obtaining links: "While most of the links to your site will be added gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject." While Google follows that statement with the caveat that promoting a site at "extreme" levels could damage a site's reputation, the advice still leaves plenty of room for promoting a website.
Here are three kinds of links that can safely be attained:
1. Research, Write, Tell Others About It
When in the planning stage of webpage content, it's important to research what kinds of sites link to content pages on that specific topic. One way to do that is to identify what kinds of sites are linking out and, most importantly, why those pages are linking out. Every link strategy I create for a client always begins with researching which sites are linking and identifying the topics that trigger them to link out. Writing the content happens after identifying the right content to publish. The biggest mistake companies make is writing the content and then trying to get links to it. That doesn't always work, no matter how good the content is. Some sites consistently link to clever content that's riding on trending topics like highly popular media. Other sites tend to link out according to the zeitgeist. Every site that links out has a reason for linking out. Find that pattern and write for it.
2. Be Proactive About Getting Quoted
There's a service called Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where publishers solicit qualified individuals to provide quotes on topics—and maybe provide a link to a website. Arguably, it could be said that HARO has been overrun for the past 10 years, as there is a large amount of competition from link builders who are swarming the system for links. And some publishers dangle a quote but never provide one. Thus, an entire business model has arisen around helping companies obtain what has come to be known as "HARO links." But why scrounge like a pigeon jostling for crumbs? There is a better way. And that way is to be proactive and approach the high-quality sites you want a link from. Everyone loves a gift—and there's no better gift for a content publisher than an article that writes itself. The best way to do that is to do research or compile statistics relevant to the readers of whatever publications are ideal for a link. As long as the topic is highly relevant, getting quoted in a ready-made article created by a press contact is a good way to get links. Be sure to request that the article be kept under embargo, which means to withhold publication until a certain date. For extra punch, publish the entire data set on your own website, then provide some of that data to the publishers and ask them to consider linking to the page with the full report.
What About Infographics? In the old days, people would produce infographics by creating a visual representation of government statistics, turning dry text into an easier-to-visualize infographic. But people consume media on mobile phones, and infographics don't always look great on mobile devices. The infographics approach for off-page SEO can be considered an expired practice.
Stick To News And Announcements In the long run, building a list of desirable sites for publication may make more sense. Then, research each site to see what relevant article topics are published, the kind of sources they link to, and article pitches they may be open to entertaining. They don't have to be sites that offer link opportunities, either. There's immense value in positioning the name of a company in front of tens of thousands of potential clients.
3. Good Old Resource Links
Some sites still publish links to sites that provide a particular kind of resource, like a download, templates, instructions on how to do something, patterns, and so on. Websites love linking to useful content. But again, don't build the content and find someone to link to it. Find out who links to resources, and then build that kind of content. Be sure to give it a great angle—a twist that makes it stand out from other sites.
The Guest Posting Reality Check
Guest posting has been officially off the table since 2014, when Matt Cutts (a Google engineer at the time) publicly posted that guest posting for links was over. Matt Cutts wrote: "So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it's just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn't recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn't recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a link building strategy."
As recently as 2020, Google's John Mueller explained that Google's machine learning algorithms had a lot of training data to help it identify guest post links and automatically devalue them so that they don't help sites rank better. He had this to say about guest posts for links: "The other thing is that because this is so old, we have a lot of training data for our algorithms. I wouldn't be surprised if the largest part of those links are just ignored automatically." He then suggested doing something useful instead: "If all that work is for ignored links, why not just do something useful instead?"
Guest Post For Higher Earnings, Not Links A better approach to take with guest posts is to use them to build,
