Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO revolves around actions taken outside of your site to improve perceptions of it as a quality resource. Remember that Google looks at a website’s E-A-T to evaluate its quality—and one of the major signals here is a website’s backlink profile, all of the external links that point to your site.

Why do backlinks matter? Two practical reasons:

• Link equity: Content receiving more backlinks generally receives more link equity. Just like how the strongest research papers get the most citations, Google’s PageRank algorithm views websites that receive more backlinks as better quality.
• Referral traffic: The more backlinks to your site exist on other sites, the more potential sources of referral traffic you’ll have. Users will have more ways of finding your site than through search alone.

A link that points to your site from another is a vote of confidence for your content, though not all links are equal. Links pass more equity from relevant, authoritative resources, not spammy sites filled only with keywords and links. Additionally, links that give more link equity are placed somewhere central, like in a blog post’s body content rather than the footer.

Since links play such an important role in SEO, getting links (“link building”) from other sites is a major part of SEO strategies—especially new sites trying to get more traction. We’ll get into more specific link building tactics, but first, you need to know:

• How to find your website’s backlink profile
• How low-quality links affect your SEO

Important note: Link building is a tactic to improve your content’s search performance, but it should never be your biggest or only SEO priority. In other words, there’s more to SEO than just links. If your link building efforts aren’t working, it may be that your content is objectively bad—and you need to improve it before other sites even consider linking to it.

How to find your website’s backlink profile

GSC gives basic data about your backlink profile under Links in the sidebar, like which of your pages has received the most external links.

But for a more detailed backlink audit, look up your website in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Click on the number under Referring domains to find out which sites link to yours, or the Backlinks number to find out the individual linking pages. In the results page, Ahrefs even includes the date each backlink is detected.

(You can do this to not only find out your website’s backlink profile but your competitors’ as well—a great way to do competitive SEO analysis.)

Measuring website quality

Ahrefs also shows a few different ranking scores, like DR, short for Domain Rating. This is specific to Ahrefs and measures a website’s quality based on its backlink profile.

Most SEO tools have their own version of this; for example, Semrush uses Authority Score (AS) and Moz uses Domain Authority (DA). They’re helpful for gauging which websites to prioritize for link building. No matter which metric you use, the higher the score, the better—so ideally, when given the option, you’d want a link from a site with a high DR than a low one.

You should avoid obsessing over improving this score for your site or only getting links from sites of a certain DR, though. These rankings are useful for understanding what sites are authoritative but in the end, they’re vanity metrics created by other companies.

Topical relevance—that is, whether a site covers the same topics as yours—is just as important. A link from a low-DR website in your niche tends to benefit your SEO more than a high-DR website in a completely different industry.

Low-quality links

Over time, your website will probably get low-quality links, like from spammy, low-DR websites that scrape content. This is inevitable; even the most reputable sites have bad links in their backlink profile.

While these links aren’t ideal, they’re generally not an issue for your site’s SEO. Google can recognize spammy links and won’t penalize your site unless there’s an excessive amount of them—for example, if they outnumber high-quality links.

This could happen if a competitor practices negative SEO, which involves building a lot of spammy links to your site. In this case, you can use Google’s Disavow tool to tell Google to ignore these links.

But for most sites, poor links won’t negatively impact your SEO. There’s rarely a need to disavow links.

Link building overview

Link building is hard. But with more industry connections and a stronger brand reputation, it becomes easier because people link to your content organically. Later on, you may not need to spend as much time building links (unless you find new competitors edging your site out of the top rankings).

For new companies starting out, though, there are rarely any shortcuts for going about link building. You can pay for backlinks from other sites, but this is considered black hat SEO. Google’s guidelines classify paid links as link schemes, which also includes using other forms of payment like:

• Exchanging goods or services for links
• Sending someone a "free" product in exchange for a link
• Trading links between different websites

Still, many agencies and freelance SEO consultants offer paid link-building services, with a wide spectrum in both price and quality. These include:

• Link building platforms (e.g., FAT JOE, Stan Ventures), usually run by agencies. You buy links from them just as you would order something off Amazon.
• Link exchanges, where you pay a website directly to get a backlink to your content included.
• Professional link builders—agencies or independent consultants and writers who act like PR specialists for SEO. They pitch and write content for established sites to get a backlink to your site.

Generally, all charge higher prices for links from more authoritative websites. And while they all fall under the link scheme category, their execution varies.

Some paid links are purely transactional, resulting in irrelevant or low-quality links. For example, someone places your link about CRM software on a site about cars. Other paid links are more thoughtful and deliberate, like a link from a blog post that covers the same topic your content addresses.

The reality: it’s possible to pay for high-quality links without getting penalized by Google. The bigger factor here is the quality of link building services you pay for.

Quality link builders invest a lot of time in finding relevant websites that actually benefit from a link to your site; they don’t force unnatural links on unrelated sites. Because of this, they cost a lot, charging as much as $5,000 for 10 links. It may make sense to keep this function inhouse, but if this isn’t possible, here’s how you can vet link building services:

1. Look at their testimonials or case studies. Specifically, look for familiar brands that have worked with them.
   • Many companies are secretive about using paid link services, so you probably won’t see major brand names. But you may recognize mid-sized companies, which tend to give more reliable testimonials than small, unknown businesses that don’t understand SEO so well.
2. Cross-check these clients’ SEO performance using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Do they rank on the first page of SERPs for any keywords? If so, what keywords? How relevant are these keywords to the client?
3. Choose a link building service that’s worked with recognizable companies that have high-ranking content. If an established company with good SEO can vouch for this service, it’s a good sign it delivers relevant and authoritative links.

Link building strategies

We classify inbound links into three categories:

1. Owned: Acquired through channels and accounts you have control over.
   • Example: You create a profile for your company on G2 and add a link to your site.
2. Acquired: Acquired through deliberate effort.
   • Example: You submit a guest column to TechCrunch and include a relevant link to your blog post.
3. Organic: Naturally given to your site without any effort from you.
   • Example: Another website links to your graphic design tutorial in a blog post.

You can increase your chances of getting organic links by creating fantastic content—but beyond content creation, these links are generally out of your control. Because of this, we’ll focus on strategies for building owned and acquired links.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the tactics we’ll get into. (Note that this is a non-exhaustive list. Many other link building strategies exist, but we’ve focused on the most effective ones based on our experience.)

Some of the tactics covered here are also discussed in our Content Marketing module’s Distribution lesson. That’s because more broadly, link-building is a form of content distribution—it’s done to promote your content, although specifically with SEO in mind.

Which link building strategies should you prioritize?

Some of the advice from our Distribution lesson also applies here—specifically, the recommendation that you leverage existing relationships first. So when you’re reading through these link building tactics, consider:

• Do you have any relationships with other brands, e.g., parent/sister companies, an incubator?
• Do you know any employees at another company in your industry?
• Do you know any journalists or freelance writers who write about your industry?
• What online communities are you active in?

Just like it makes more sense to ask someone you know for a favor instead of a stranger, your existing relationships provide a better starting point for building links.