Off-Page SEO: What Others Say About You, and How Google Reads Each Part

You hired someone for off-page SEO. At the end of the month, a spreadsheet arrived with forty new links. Nobody explained where they came from, or what each one proves about your company.

Search for “seo off page” on Google in Brazil, where we are based, and you get that same spreadsheet in article form. On September 14, 2026, I read the first page twice, once in Semrush and once live on Google. That came to thirteen texts. All thirteen treat the link as an off-page tactic, and only three link to any Google page about links. ¹

None of the thirteen separates the story a newsroom decided to publish from the press release the company itself distributed. That is the question that organizes this piece.

Here, off-page SEO comes in four parts, and Google reads each one by its own path. For each part, I bring what the official documentation says counts and what it forbids.

The menu in the window and the talk around town

Think of a new restaurant in your neighborhood. In the window, it hangs the menu, with photos and the line “the best in town.” The owner wrote every word of it.

Before you walk in, you check other things. A friend texts you the address and says “go.” The local paper mentions the restaurant by name in a story about street food. The app shows the rating that two hundred customers gave it. And a magazine runs a food critic’s column, which praises one dish and complains about another.

The menu is what the restaurant says about itself. The rest is what others say about it, in places the owner does not control. In search, that second side has a name. This is called off-page SEO.

The first side, the menu, is on-page SEO: title, text, and structure, everything that lives on your own page.

On the page where it explains how it ranks results, Google names one of its quality factors. It checks whether other prominent websites link to the content or refer to it. ² Link and reference appear in the same sentence.

Back to the restaurant. The friend who texts the address is the link. The paper that prints the name is the mention. The rating in the app is the review. The critic’s column is editorial coverage. Google has its own rules for each one.

Part one: the link, the vote with written rules

A link from another site to yours is a recommendation the machine can follow. The off-page market grew up around it. That is also why it is the part with the most rules published by Google.

What the spam policy calls link spam

Google’s spam policy has a section on links. It defines link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. ³ The list of examples is concrete.

Exchanging money for links, or for posts that contain links. Trading goods or services for links. Sending someone a product so they write about it and include a link. Excessive link exchanges, the “link to me and I’ll link to you” kind. ³

The list goes on with what the market still sells as off-page SEO. Advertorials that pay for links passing ranking credit. Links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites. Low-quality directory links. Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature. ³

The same page carries the caveat almost nobody quotes. Google writes that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web, for advertising and sponsorship. A paid link stays within the policy when it carries the nofollow or sponsored attribute. ³ The rule targets the paid link dressed up as a spontaneous recommendation.

The three labels a link can carry

Think of the word “Advertisement” printed across the top of a magazine page. It does not erase the text. It only tells the reader that someone paid for that space.

On a link, that label is an attribute written in the code. Google recognizes three values. This is called qualifying the link. ⁴

The sponsored value marks ads and paid placements. Nofollow is still accepted for those, though sponsored is preferred. ⁴ The ugc value marks user-generated content, like comments and forum posts. ⁴ Nofollow covers the remaining cases. You use it when you would rather Google not associate your site with the linked page. ⁴

Since September 10, 2019, all three have worked as hints. Google uses those hints, along with other signals, to decide how to analyze and use each link. ⁵ For crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint on March 1, 2020. ⁵

What happens to the bought link

In July 2021, Google wrote about sponsored and guest post campaigns built to gain links. It said it had gotten much better at detecting and nullifying that kind of scheme. ⁶ In December 2022, it announced that SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system, could now detect sites that buy links. It could also detect sites used to pass links along. ⁷

The same announcement says what happens next. Unnatural links are neutralized, and the credit they passed is lost. ⁷ Read that with your budget in hand. One concrete risk of a bought link is paying for a vote the system cancels without telling anyone.

How to earn links within the rules is a method of its own, and it stays outside this piece. Here, you get the rules of the game.

Part two: your name in writing, with a link or without

Back to the local paper that mentioned the restaurant in a story. It printed the name and added no link at all. For search, that is material too.

A patent granted to Google in 2014, US 8,682,892, describes a citation without a link. It is a reference to a page, written on another page. The document calls this an implied link. ⁸ It also carries an independence filter. Pages with the same owner, the same host, or the same creator can be treated as not independent. The same goes for identical or very similar content. ⁸

The limit comes with it, and I do not bend on it. A patent does not prove implementation. It shows how Google engineers thought about the problem, without saying whether it runs today or with what weight. This one, by the way, shows up on Google Patents as expired for nonpayment of fees. ⁸ I covered this patent in more depth in the piece on brand authority.

Two questions a mention answers

A mention works for two different questions, and mixing them up derails the plan.

The first is who you are. Picture the restaurant listed in five places: the app, the paper, the restaurant association, a dining guide, and the city’s health inspection site. If all five show the same name and the same address, nobody doubts they mean the same place. Independent sources state the same facts, until the system pulls everything into a single record. In the book SEO de Entidade, this is called identity corroboration. ⁹

The second is whether what you claim about your subject holds up. Imagine the same restaurant swearing, on its menu, that raw fish needs no refrigeration. The address is still right everywhere, and the claim stands alone against what the whole industry says. Checking each claim against what your field supports, sentence by sentence, is what the book calls consensus. ¹⁰ A company can have its identity fully confirmed and, on the same site, publish a claim its industry contradicts. ¹⁰

Off-page SEO weighs more on the first question. Each source that spells your name right, with the right city, lowers the cost of working out who you are. Each different spelling raises it. ⁹ The method for building this is in the piece on corroboration.

A word of caution about profiles. Your Instagram, your LinkedIn, and your blog talk about you in your own voice. Two sources with the same owner repeat what the other said, without checking anything. ⁹ They help say who you are, and the confirmation has to come from outside.

Part three: the rating the customer gave

Now open the maps app, standing on the sidewalk. Between two restaurants a block apart, you choose by looking at the rating and the number of reviews. Google looks at those two numbers too.

The Business Profile help says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity. ¹¹ On the same page, the third factor gets the heading Prominence. It means how well known a business is. The text says it is also based on how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has. ¹¹

On the rating, the page says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. ¹¹ Hold on to the word can. And to the warning that opens the section: there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. ¹¹

The payment the rules forbid is payment for the review. The Maps policy says reviews paid for, directly or in kind, are fake engagement, and they get removed. Merchants also cannot offer payment, discounts, or free goods in exchange for a review, or for removing a negative one. ¹²

Asking is allowed. Google’s help tells you to send customers a link or a QR code for reviews, and to reply to what comes in. ¹³ The same page says a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy. ¹³

Then there is what the customer writes inside the review. A Google patent granted in 2022, US 11,328,218, describes how to identify subjective attributes of an entity from people’s reactions. The document’s example is a video. When the word “cute” shows up in a significant share of the comments, that attribute gets a high score. ¹⁴ The document’s list of entities includes commercial businesses. ¹⁴

This reading is mine, and I flag it as such: what customers write can become a description of you. A patent does not prove implementation, and this one does not say the system reads business reviews today. ¹⁴ The rest of the local work is in the local SEO section.

Part four: the story someone decided to publish

A critic’s column and a paid advertisement can run in the same issue, in the same typeface. The newsroom decided on one. Whoever paid for the space decided on the other.

In the book SEO de Entidade, I classify every mention by a single question: who decided to publish it. ¹⁵ In earned coverage, the outlet decided. In a mass-distributed press release, a distribution algorithm decided. In directories and material you upload yourself, you decided. In an accidental mention, nobody decided. ¹⁵

The distributed press release

Google’s policy treats the press release in two ways, and both are worth reading. A link with optimized anchor text in a distributed press release is an example of link spam. ³ And wire service or press release service sites appear among the examples that do not conflict with the site reputation policy. ³ For the policy, the problem lives in the optimized link inside the release. The question left over is what the release proves.

It proves little about independence, because the text is yours, repeated at other addresses. One of the English-language guides on that Brazilian first page recommends press releases to gain backlinks. ¹ Compare that with the spam example from the policy, quoted above.

It is not junk, either. The book records the case of a building materials manufacturer. Its releases named the company, the executive, the industry, and the city. That set of consistent facts, published on third-party domains, is raw material for identity corroboration. ¹⁵ The evidence against came from the same case. Four releases, reproduced at about twenty addresses, added up to about 17 referral sessions in 365 days. ¹⁵

Coverage someone else reported

In earned coverage, a journalist chose the angle and signed the story. There, an independent source confirms who you are, and that is the kind of source notability standards ask for. ¹⁵ The encyclopedia case is in Wikidata and notability.

If you hire someone for press work, count the stories a newsroom decided to publish, with a named reporter. ¹⁵ A disclosure, right where the advice sits: SEO Genome sells digital PR work. The yardstick above applies to any vendor, and it applies to us.

The tactics list, with the question alongside

The lists on that first page put everything in the same column. Separate them this way:

The first hour of work

Set up a sheet with four columns: link, mention, review, and story. Then take this tour, in order.

1. Search Console, Links. Open External links, then Top linking sites. The report is a sample, and it does not show which links are nofollow. ¹⁶ Next to each site, write down who decided to publish.
2. Your name in five sources. Open your site, your Business Profile, your LinkedIn, an industry directory, and a news story side by side. Copy the name, city, and line of business exactly as written. Mark every mismatch. ⁹
3. Your reviews. On your Business Profile, count the reviews from the last three months. Reply to the ones that call for a reply, and create your review request link. ¹³
4. Your press folder. For each story, write down who decided to publish it: the newsroom, the wire service, or you. ¹⁵
5. Your paid links. If you pay for advertorials or sponsorships, check that the links carry sponsored or nofollow. ^{3 4}

From now on, when someone shows you a spreadsheet of links as an off-page SEO report, you will ask for the other three columns. And, on every row, who decided to publish.

Open Search Console today, go to Links, and print the list of top linking sites. That is the first column of the sheet.