I would say that before this course, I actually thought that SEO happened solely on your own website. I figured if you make good titles, clean pages, good keywords, Google would reward you with better rankings. I didn’t consider how much happens outside of your own website. So when we got to offsite SEO, it made sense that search engines rely so heavily on what happens outside of what they control is an awareness of what others do (or don’t do) for (or against) credibility.

Offsite SEO is anything that ranks your site from outside your control and domain. Therefore, when we learned this section it finally made sense why two sites could rank differently with the exact same copy. Google values trust just as much as it values relevance to the topic at hand. Trust comes from mentions, affiliations and authority generated outside of a single domain.

The biggest factor of offsite SEO is backlinks. Before this course, I considered a backlink just another word for hyperlink. Now I understand why people fight for them. Essentially, a backlink is another website lending credibility to yours. If a major website links back to you, that’s a sign for Google that your information is either critical or that people find it so. Not all backlinks are created equal either. A mention from a top news site’s blog post or a university website weighs more than a back link from some obscure blog post. It’s like getting a reference from someone widely known in your field versus a random Joe Smo off the street. It’s reputable.

What surprised me the most was that backlinks work best when they are earned naturally. Spam link campaigns, link farms or buying links can do more harm than good to your efforts. Google realizes when efforts have been manufactured and they penalize forced linking. For example, in class we learned that quality matters more than quantity; relevancy matters more than quantity. That makes the process make sense because Google is looking to replicate reality. If people are talking about you in real life without any monetary incentive, they trust you. Therefore, Google will trust you enough to rank you higher.

Brand mentions are another offsite factor that I never even thought about prior to this course. Even if someone is talking about your brand without linking you back, search engines still utilize that information as a positive or negative; if people are talking about your brand or circulating it around, that’s a good thing. Therefore, this helped me understand social media and online review sites better as SEO; I used to think they were separate but they lend themselves to an overall perspective of how popular or credible your brand is.

Local SEO was also more relevant than I expected for offsite SEO—listings and reviews and accuracy help determine how credible a business is perceived to be. If your hours of operation/phone number/address is different from website to website, Google sees this poorly credible; if you have good reviews or terrible reviews, they matter—real reviews have significant SEO power and impact ranking integrity because they bolster legitimate experiences and sometimes responding to reviews (when appropriate) helps notify Google that a business does exist.

Another part of offsite SEO that helped shifted my perspective was how credibility is bolstered by content created outside of one’s own site—guest posts, interviews, webinars, collaborations help position one as the expert on other forums. This helps foster an organic opportunity for linking and mentions; never realized how much one can grow just by lending expertise outside of their own site and not keeping their knowledge to themselves. It helps create an interconnectedness of authority; if one is given the opportunity to have their name pop up on many different sites, people are more likely to seek them out later and Google recognizes that interest.

One of the best things I learned during this course was how not to do certain things; buying backlinks from cheap sources, trying to use the same anchor text everywhere, adding your link to spam directories or doing mass outreach emails can hurt more than help. Google is smarter than that. Authenticity matters more than volume. This was nice to learn because it suggests that smaller websites still have an opportunity to gain authority if they focus on good connections and real credible content instead of shortcuts.

One important thing I learned about offsite SEO is that it takes time. It’s a long game process where consistency matters more than quick wins; you can optimize a landing page in an afternoon but you can’t get someone talking about your brand overnight. This was a nice reminder that SEO plays at different timelines; onsite may help get your house in order but offsite determines who trusts that house.

Ultimately, what I learned from offsite SEO is how expansive the ecosystem truly is; a website does not live in a vacuum. It lives in the context of conversations happening about it-good and bad mentions and links-and Google uses that information to determine which sites get ranked higher than others. Offsite SEO taught me that credibility comes through association, not just code, and when combined with strong onsite SEO efforts plus additional offsite strategies, any website has the best chances of ranking and growing. This part of the course made me realize how interdependent digital marketing truly is.