What Are Off Page Factors?
Where your site ranks in the search engine is determined essentially by two sorts of factors: off page factors and on page factors.
Off page factors are all those factors that are used by the search engines to rank a site excluding the content of your web pages. These include links from other sites, the domain name, the age of the domain name, the richness and depth of content on the site, which company is hosting the site etc.
Off page factors are distinct from On page factors in that they cannot so readily be changed by the webmaster. In the early days of search engines, judging sites by off page factors as well as on page factors increased the usefulness of search results. In particular the ranking of a site by seeing how many other sites linked to it made a huge difference to the quality of search results as was one of the reasons why Google became so successful: it treated links to a site as a vote for the site. Furthermore, a link to a site from a popular site counted for more than a link from an obscure site.
Internet marketers nonetheless have learnt to make use of off page factors by exchanging links and by using other techniques to populate links to their own sites as part of their SEO strategies.