Link Building & Off-Page SEO: The Complete Guide
Link building and off-page SEO covers every signal about a website that originates outside the website itself — chiefly the backlinks pointing to it. It spans domain and page authority, anchor text, link equity flow, digital PR, and the difference between links that pass ranking signals and those that do not.
All 34 terms in Link Building & Off-Page
Backlink
A link from another website pointing to a page on yours.
Digital PR
Earning editorial links and brand mentions by pitching stories to journalists.
Domain Authority (DA)
Moz's 1–100 machine-learning score predicting how well a domain can rank.
Domain Rating (DR)
A third-party 0–100 score estimating the strength of a site's backlink profile.
Link Building
The practice of earning links from other websites to yours.
Link Equity
The ranking value a hyperlink passes from one page to another. Also called link juice.
Linkable Asset
A piece of content so useful or original that other sites link to it voluntarily.
Nofollow Link
A link tagged rel="nofollow" that tells Google not to pass ranking credit to the destination.
Off-Page SEO
SEO signals that come from other sites and the wider web, not your own pages.
Referring Domain
A unique website that links to yours, counted once no matter how many links it sends.
Anchor Text Distribution
The mix of link-text types pointing to a page — a naturalness signal for backlink profiles.
Backlink Profile
The full collection of links pointing to a site, viewed as one overall pattern.
Broken Link Building
Earning backlinks by finding dead links on other sites and offering your page as the replacement.
Disavow File
A text file telling Google to ignore specific incoming links when assessing your site.
Dofollow Link
A standard link with no suppressing rel attribute, so it passes ranking credit to the target.
Editorial Link
A backlink a publisher gives voluntarily because your page was worth citing.
Follow vs Nofollow
The distinction between links that pass ranking credit and links tagged rel="nofollow" that don't.
Guest Posting
Writing an article for another site's blog, historically to earn a backlink.
Link Spam
Links created mainly to manipulate rankings, which Google's policies prohibit.
Outreach
Contacting site owners, editors, and journalists by email to earn backlinks, coverage, or placements.
PageRank
Google's original link-analysis algorithm that scores pages by the links they receive.
Private Blog Network (PBN)
A network of sites one owner controls purely to pass manipulative links to a money site.
Toxic Backlink
An industry label for an incoming link judged likely to hurt rankings — a term Google itself does not use.
Unlinked Brand Mention
A reference to your brand in someone else's content that names you but doesn't hyperlink to your site.
URL Rating (UR)
A third-party 0–100 score for the link strength of a single page, not a whole site.
Co-citation
When two sources reference the same brand, search engines may infer they are related.
Exact Match Anchor
A backlink whose visible text is exactly the keyword the target page wants to rank for.
Link Bait
Content built to provoke a reaction so people share and link to it voluntarily.
Link Exchange
Two sites agreeing to link to each other, which becomes link spam when done excessively to manipulate rankings.
Link Insertion
Placing a backlink into a page's existing, already-published content rather than a new article.
Link Reclamation
Recovering backlinks you've lost or never captured — fixing broken inbound links and unlinked mentions.
Link Velocity
The rate at which a page or site gains (or loses) backlinks over time.
Sponsored Link Attribute
The rel="sponsored" value that flags a link as an advertisement or paid placement to Google.
UGC Link Attribute
The rel="ugc" value that flags a link as coming from user-generated content like comments or forums.
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