What Is Off Page SEO?

Off page SEO is the process of generating backlinks to your site from other sites on the web, especially those that that are of authority and trust. All links are not created equal. Here, I have not used the term building backlinks to your site. It is all about earning links, the prized editorial links, of highest value in the linking hierarchy.

All the action takes place outside of your site. In short, as a site owner, you have very little control over who links to you and the manner in which they link to you. This is the true reason why search engine algorithms weight off page factors heavily in the ranking of sites on the Google SERPs.

Quality Of Backlinks Vs Quantity

Having thousands of backlinks pointing to your site is not really a win. From the quality perspective, a single backlink from an authoritative site can be more powerful than a thousand profile links from forums and blog comments. It is not a game of numbers. It is a game of earning links of topical relevance to your site.

EAT And YMYL Vital To Google

Google has clearly laid emphasis on page quality with its updates in middle of 2018 and 2019. Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness and Your Money Or Your Life were two major updates that laid stress on beneficial purpose of a website wherein its primary purpose should be to help users. Low quality sites were deemed those that just tried to make money without providing any useful information to users.

YMYL (Your Money Or Your Life) focused on health and finance niches. Both enrich and sustain lives of people. Sites publishing poor quality information with the aim of making money leads to dangerous results if people end up following spurious advice that can destroy their lives.

E-A-T says it all. It is part of the guidelines human evaluators hired by Google follow to deem the quality of a site based on its content. Google does not depend on just its machine learning driven algorithms to judge a site’s quality. Expertise, trustworthiness and authority are integral to the quality of a site.

Expertise on a site is reflected by its content. The depth of knowledge shared is a clear indicator of expertise. Authority and trustworthiness both stem from the author or creator of such in-depth content, how they are regarded in their field (applies to health and finance field only) and how trustworthy they are by way of the practical experience they have garnered in that field.

Google is vague about these updates and typically so, as it has learned from its previous mistakes of being transparent. It gave a clear idea of its PageRank algorithm so much so it got spammed so badly that it virtually trashed the search listings pages. It is natural that Google is guarded about opening up on its algorithms and related updates.

Domain Authority

A site is considered an authority when its domain has been around for a long time, it has developed quality content over the years and has earned tons of backlinks naturally from other sites that have linked back to the site, primarily as a source of excellent information, in its niche.

Two Types Of Backlinks

Dofollow and Nofollow are the two well known backlink types.

Dofollow links

These allow link juice to flow from the originating site to the page of the site the link is pointing to. Only the search engine bots can recognize this difference via source code.
Example of dofollow link:
<a href="https://trafficalignment.com/contact/">Contact</a>
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Nofollow links

These do not allow the passing of link juice from the page of a site to the page it points to on another site.
Example of nofollow link:
<a href="https://trafficalignment.com/contact/" rel="nofollow">Contact</a>


The condition defined by rel=”nofollow” makes all the difference here.

Google’s original intent was for site owners to specify to Google and other bots that a link to a page is not to be followed. But this was manipulated by artificially flowing the link juice from the home page of a site to most coveted money pages on the same site. This whole process was called link sculpting. This is not a natural linking style.

Natural Backlinks Increase Domain Trust

It reached a point where linking to external sites were typically nofollow links, in order to preserve the PageRank of the originating page.

What is being ignored here is the fact that when a site, especially a new one, links naturally to a site of high authority and trust, it gains trust by decreasing the number of hops it takes to connect to a trustworthy site. In other words, this improves the trust of the linking domain.

Specific Cases To Use Nofollow Links

There are cases where you are best off to use nofollow links to avoid getting into the bad books of Google and not get penalized. These specific cases include:

• Paid Links – Google frowns upon this practice where money changes hands for a link placement
• Affiliate Links – You drive traffic to Amazon product pages and earn a commission when users buy those products
• Paid Review – As owner of an authority site, you get services/products for free when you agree to write a review
• Guest posting – Allow others to write guest articles on your blog but nofollow the links back to the author’s bio
• Widgets/Software – Ensure free software/widget you offer has nofollow links back to your site in the embed code you offer to others to link back to your site

Backlinks Are Great Traffic Sources

One thing that has never ceased to amaze me is that backlinks are always viewed as a way to rank on top of Google’s search listings. It is a crucial factor in the final ranking of a site. But this heavily biased ranking perspective has blunted the original purpose of the backlink.

Backlinks direct traffic back to your site. This is not given much consideration. It is all about obsessing with dofollow and nofollow links and how Pagerank flows and does not flow.

Imagine your site getting a nofollow backlink from an authoritative site whose content is eagerly devoured by hordes of focused users. Imagine your content is so good that the other site gave you a prized “contextual” link, words appearing naturally in the content as anchor text or link text, pointing back to your site.

It is going to attract lot of eyeballs that end up visiting your site to read what you have written. This is the way the web is meant to work. If you are still upset about getting a nofollow link, how do you know that the search engines are not going to consider it as valuable or not?

Even if a link is nofollow, it is still a matter of doubt that search engine crawlers ignore it. Crawlers can still follow the link and go on to crawl other parts of that site. There have been numerous cases documented to prove the power of a nofollow link from a high authority site.

They are also going to take note of the content and index it which is the default unless noindex is specified. But it is a huge matter of debate if the bots strictly adhere to such rules in cases like this where there is top quality spider food waiting to be eaten.

The Web Is All About Links

Can you imagine a world where webmasters and site owners are so scared to link out as they don’t want to leak the link juice from their sites? They want to preserve it at all costs.

All they care about is getting backlinks from top notch sites with high authority and trust. Forget about the crawling and indexing of sites by the major search engines which are done via links. If the bots cannot find anything, forget about ranking and the Google SERPs.

All this leaves a totally unnatural linking pattern that is clearly suspect and at the same time broken. It is only natural to link freely to content of high quality. The same happens to your site when other site owners link to it of their own volition.

Link Building From Two Perspectives

From Human POV

You are obsessed with getting links from an authority site in your niche as you see your competitor having gained one. Since ranking is your priority, your consideration is all about

• Can I get the coveted link from a top tier page? (more link juice and hence ranking power)
• Can I get the anchor text (words in hyperlinks) as close to my specific search term of choice?
• How many places can I move up in the Google SERPs?

From The Search Bots Perspective

• What is the primary reason for existence of such a link? (to inform and engage users?)
• What is the nature of the page this link is pointing to? (topically relevant)
• Is the link pointing to a good neighborhood?
• What are the words in the hyperlink saying? (cue to understanding the page the link is pointing to given that the bots are yet to crawl the page the link points to)
• What kind of a user experience will this result in?

Best Practice For Backlinks

On the web, you have no control over who links to your site. But, Google and Bing have a disavowal tool that allows you to reject backlinks from poor neighborhoods. Make it a point to follow these practices.

Avoid Hyper Optimized Backlink Text

If a nasty competitor throws several backlinks at your site with keyword rich anchor text, disavow each one of them at all costs. Poor quality sites linking back to sites with keyword rich anchor text triggered the Penguin update. Failing to reject such links will lead to your site getting penalized by Google

If you build backlinks to your site, avoid keyword rich text. Use a synonym or closely related word to the actual keyword you would desire.

Topical Relevance

Link to pages on sites that are topically relevant or a close variant of your niche. The classic example I like to quote is that of an auto mechanic linking to a bridal gowns site. Both professions are completely mutually exclusive and any such linking makes no sense. It is a very unnatural pattern.

Avoid getting a backlink from an unrelated niche just because it is an authority site and in this special case, it is owned by your friend.

Apply E-A-T Concept To Backlinks

Focus on creating top quality content. Put in some serious hard work to prove your worth as a true expert in your domain, in the eyes of fellow humans. It is your expertise in content that marks you as an authority.

The power of your content driven by your practical experience in your field bestows authority. This leads to your content getting shared naturally around the web. Over time, this translates to authority when other topically relevant sites of high authority and trust link back to you.

An Earned Link Is Far Better Than Any Other

Links that are contextually embedded in content and point back to your site have the highest value. Editorial links from other powerful sites can go a long way in changing the ranking fortunes of a site.

Manual Link Building

Not everyone can be a Beethoven or an Usain Bolt. Majority of us attempt to build links manually through forum profiles, blog commenting, article spinning, linking to other blogs, directory submissions and so on. All these  generate low quality links and are frowned upon by Google.

Variations To Manual Link Building

These tips below require that you are a master of the subject matter in the domain of interest.

Directory Submission

Going back in time, there were some great directories like Best of the Web (BOTW), Business.com, DMOZ and Yahoo Directory. Of these, BOTW, Business.com were and still are paid annual listings with a decent price tag.

These sites maintained such high standards that it was not easy to get accepted at the cost of paying for the links to be submitted for inclusion. These backlinks were powerful and the major search engine bots spidered these sites all the time.

Google did not look at it as paid listings because you had to have a great site to deserve a place there. To be honest, I am not sure of the standards today as it has been ages since I made a directory submission.

Check out the directories of value that are relevant today

Blog Commenting

Visit your niche’s top influencer’s site. Read the blog post and add value to it by leaving a top quality detailed comment. This should add more value to the existing article.

Follow this influencer on social media. Leave comments and insights that make you stand out. Once you have gained the influencer’s attention, make an email outreach and express your desire to write on the influencer’s blog. It will be hard to reject your request as you have proved yourself beyond a point.

Also, subscribe to the influencer blog’s RSS feed. As soon as a post is published, you can be the early bird that gets the worm by posting your comment right at the top. This gets eyeballs of other readers/commenters who get to know you and end up following your profile to your site.

Repurposing Content

At the beginning, when your site is in its infancy, write a top notch article. In the old link building days, this article would be put through an article spinner, spun using various synonyms of the keywords. The sentence structure would be altered to make each variation look like a different article and submitted to various article directories. Doing it today is a surefire recipe to getting penalized.

You can instead repurpose the article as a podcast, a video, a powerpoint presentation on Slideshare, images on Pinterest, posts on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to gain the attention of fellow readers and also the search bots.

These are natural ways of linking back to your site and getting lot of traffic from them. Forget the concept of dofollow and nofollow. Getting links from such behemoth sites is itself a huge advantage and especially so, when search engines know their popularity by the number of likes, shares, retweets etc gained by your post.

Novel Link Building

When you create a beneficial product that helps users by providing useful information, it brings with it natural goodness, read “great source of backlinks” in this context.

Creating Infographics

Who doesn’t love a problem, covering tons of pages, being explained visually in a simple way that is easily digestible?
Infographic is a visual approach using images, tables, charts and text to explain any topic in an intuitive and easy to understand manner.

These are not easy to create and there is a whole industry that has mushroomed with the advent of infographics. Prices can vary depending on the quality of the designer of the infographic and the complexity of the problem.

Creating Software

A software is generally thought of as a complex product developed by highly skilled developers requiring specialized knowledge. It is true to an extent, depending on the situation.

Numerous users amongst us need a way to encode html or use special characters in their content for which they need the corresponding html characters. Consider a tool that compresses an image to reduce the file size. These are just examples but hopefully drive home the point.

If you are in the weight loss niche, having a calculator on your site to convert pounds into kilograms for our British friends and most of the world, is not a complex application. But it is very helpful to users who can calculate by staying on your site. Same goes for a mortgage loan calculator if your site is mortgage based..

The more value you add to a tool and help several people in the process, giving others the embed code for this tool leads to the tool getting embedded on several sites and at the same time providing a great source of backlinks to your site.

NOTE: Ensure that all the links you provide in the embed code are nofollow links

Off Page Factors Cannot Be Manipulated

In my estimate, the power attributed to off page factors when it comes to ranking a site on the top of Google search listings mountain is easily 60% to 70%. This is because no SEO professional or spammer or anyone in between can manipulate off page factors, unlike on page factors that is totally under the control of the site owner.

As SEO involves structural and visual elements that can be optimized or manipulated, whichever be the case, search engines know that gaming the system with backlinks is near impossible. Updates like Penguin have put an end to such practices. Doing it today is at the peril of the site owner, to the detriment of his own site.

To Build Or Not To Build Backlinks Is The Question

Not every link created can be an editorial link however prized and much sought after it is. In short, building links should encompass a variety of sources of differing quality levels. This combination ideally represents a natural linking pattern.

Getting only high quality backlinks or only poor quality backlinks looks very unnatural to search engines and improbable as well. Aim for the skies but do not land on the ground with a thud. Maintain a certain level that will happen naturally when you take E-A-T into account.

Here at Traffic Alignment, we specialize in building top quality links through content marketing services, focused on small businesses, that can give the best return on your investment for a nominal ad spend on social media and a modest monthly fee. Contact us today!