Outreach built on relationships, not link requests.

Google has no documentation on outreach, so nothing in this section is Google's guidance on how to do it. The relevant sources are its description of what to avoid and its general advice on promotion. The SEO Starter Guide lists community engagement and word of mouth among ways to promote a site, says word of mouth can take time and effort, and warns that over-promotion can harm a site.

The spam policies set the limits. Among the examples of link spam are excessive link exchanges ("link to me and I'll link to you"), using automated programs or services to create links, and forum comments with optimised links in the post or signature. Getting to know the people who edit, research and run communities in your field is not on that list.

Communities are a special case. Google recommends marking user-generated links, such as comments and forum posts, with ugc (or nofollow). So a link placed in a community may be qualified by the platform. That is a reason to value the relationship and the audience in their own right, and not to count the link alone.

Google also says violations are detected by automated systems and, as needed, human review, and that sites violating its policies may rank lower or not appear at all. In our view a request that reads as a link exchange puts the other site's standing at risk as well as yours, which is a good reason to ask for nothing that looks like one.

Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links sorts links by how they came about: paid placements get sponsored, user-generated links get ugc, and nofollow is for links the publisher would rather not vouch for. A link a publisher places freely, because the page is worth pointing to, needs none of these. Google does not define "editorial" on that page, so we use the word to mean a link given by choice, not paid for, exchanged or generated.

Google does not state relevance as a rule or a number. Its Links report help does give a practical test of what you want to see: whether sites that are important to you point to your site. Its example is a restaurant site and whether food blogs and review sites mention it. The same page suggests checking that sites linking to you describe you accurately.

The spam policies also say that sending a product in exchange for a write-up that includes a link is link spam, and that exchanging goods, services or money for links is. Google adds that buying and selling links is a normal part of advertising and sponsorship, and is not a violation if the links are qualified with nofollow or sponsored.

Another listed example shows why the choice has to stay with the publisher. Google counts requiring a link as part of a terms of service, contract or similar arrangement, without letting the content owner choose whether to qualify it, as link spam. Whoever gives the link keeps the decision about how it is qualified.

A resource opportunity is a page that already lists useful material on a subject, where a further useful item would belong. Google has no guidance on finding or approaching these, so this is practice, not Google guidance.

What Google does say sets the terms. Its link best practices describe linking to other sites as normal, and as a way to cite sources and give readers context. Its spam policies, in turn, name low-quality directory or bookmark site links, and partner pages that exist only for cross-linking. A curated resource page that a person maintains for readers is the first case; a directory that accepts anyone is the second.

It also helps when the target page can actually be linked to. Google can generally crawl only a link that is an <a> element with an href attribute, so a resource that is reachable only through script events is hard for any site to reference.

Google's guidance on linking out says to do so when it makes sense and to give readers context about what to expect. The person maintaining a resource page is making that kind of decision, so a note that explains who the resource is for and what a reader will find respects it. Resource pages also go out of date, and their owners have reason to care about the links they list: see expired domains in outbound links.