Off-page SEO
Also called Off-site SEO
Off-page SEO is everything outside your own site that affects how search engines and AI models judge it. In practice that means links from other sites, unlinked brand mentions, reviews, and presence in the third-party sources both search engines and language models draw on. Links remain the largest component.
Written and maintained by the SEO Engico team
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Last reviewed 4 August 2026
Is off-page SEO just link building?
Links are the largest part of it but not the whole. Reviews, directory and marketplace listings, mentions in industry publications and coverage on platforms that get cited heavily by AI models all sit under off-page too, and they matter more now than they did five years ago because they feed a second channel.
The distinction worth holding onto: link building is a deliberate acquisition activity, off-page SEO is the broader state of how the web refers to you.
How many links does a site actually need?
There is no absolute number, only a relative one. What matters is the gap between your referring domain count and the sites currently holding the positions you want. A commercial term where the incumbents carry 400 to 600 referring domains is not reachable from 20, whatever the content quality.
Volume also matters far less than the source. A handful of links from sites with genuine traffic and editorial standards outperform hundreds from domains with an inflated authority score and no visitors.
Do spammy links pointing at my site cause harm?
Usually not. Google's position is that it ignores the overwhelming majority of link spam automatically, and its own guidance restricts the disavow tool to sites with a manual action, or with good reason to expect one. Most disavow work sold on the back of a third-party toxicity score is unnecessary.
There is a separate, real cost worth naming though. Third-party tools now label spam links visibly, so anyone inspecting your profile before buying sees them. That is a commercial problem rather than a ranking one, and disavowing does not fix it because those tools cannot see a disavow file.