Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the part of search engine optimization that takes place outside your own website: links and mentions on third-party websites, in industry publications, directories, and review sites, which Google interprets as indicators of visibility and trust.

What does this mean for your business?

You can’t simply commission off-page SEO like you would a page of text: Other websites link to you because your content, your product, or your name is worth it. In its guidelines, Google describes links from other sites as something that develops naturally over time. The risk lies in taking shortcuts: Purchased links violate Google’s spam guidelines and can trigger a manual action, causing the website to rank lower or disappear from search results entirely. Ask every service provider for a list of linking sites—including their domains and pages—rather than just a number of links, and have the list reviewed in an SEO audit before any link-building work begins.

Where can a medium-sized company get backlinks?

From websites that already know you: trade associations and chambers of commerce, suppliers and customers with reference pages, the regional press, universities through partnerships, and organizers of trade shows and conferences in which you participate. These links are few in number, but they come from your network and are relevant to your topic. You can find out how this works in your region in the article “How to Build Local Backlinks.”

From Our Experience

On October 20, 2026, we analyzed the backlink profile for a mechanical engineering supplier: 1,973 out of 2,750 backlinks—or 72 percent—came from domains ending in .shop, .site, or .store, which are worthless mass-produced sites. There were very few genuine linking sources. The data costs for the analysis amounted to $0.63. The number of backlinks alone doesn’t mean anything; what matters is who is linking.

Definition

• A backlink is a single link from an external site; off-page SEO considers all links and mentions collectively.
• Link building/outreach is the active process of acquiring links—it’s part of off-page SEO, not the whole of it.
• On-page SEO encompasses everything on your own website: titles, text, images, and internal links.
• "Nofollow" is the attribute that prevents a link from passing on any ranking influence; Google requires this or "rel='sponsored'" for paid links.
• An algorithmic penalty is a possible consequence of unnatural link profiles, in addition to manual action taken by Google.

Red flag in the offer

“500 backlinks for 299 euros” or any other package sold by the piece. Purchased links, large-scale link exchanges, and automatically generated links are all included in Google’s list of link spam. The example above illustrates what such a package delivers: a mass of domains that no one reads.

Source

• Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search, “Link spam” section, accessed on October 22, 2026
• Google Search Central: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide, accessed on October 22, 2026
• In-house backlink analysis for a mechanical engineering supplier, October 20, 2026 (client not named)