Off-Page SEO

Building backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO. Search engines use backlinks as indications of the linked-to content’s quality, so a site with many high-value backlinks will usually rank better than an otherwise equal site with fewer backlinks.

There are three main types of links, defined by how they were earned: natural links, manually built links, or self-created links.

• Natural links are editorially given without any action on the part of a page owner. For example, a food blogger adding a link to a post that points toward their favorite produce farms is a natural link.
• Manually built links are acquired through deliberate link-building activities. This includes things like getting customers to link to your website or asking influencers to share your content.
• Self-created links are created by practices such as adding a backlink in an online directory, forum, blog comment signature, or press release with optimized anchor text. Some self-created link-building tactics tend toward black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engines, so tread lightly here.

Regardless of how links were obtained, those that offer the greatest contribution to SEO efforts are generally those that pass the most equity. There are many signals that positively contribute to the equity passed, such as:

• The linking site’s popularity
• How related the linking site’s topic is to the site being linked to
• The “freshness” of the link
• The anchor text used on the linking site
• The trustworthiness of the linking site
• The number of other links on the linking page
• Authority of the linking domain and page