Backlink

A link on another website that points to a page on your site, also called an inbound link. Search engines can use links to discover pages and as one of many signals for understanding relevance and usefulness. A backlink's context, source, destination, anchor text, and relationship matter; raw link count alone does not determine rankings.

Why it matters: Useful mentions and editorial links can introduce people to your site and help crawlers find content, but no backlink guarantees a ranking improvement. Focus on work that genuinely earns attention, such as original resources, credible reporting, partnerships, or relevant outreach. Avoid buying ranking credit, automated link creation, excessive exchanges, and other manipulative schemes. Paid placements should be qualified appropriately, and backlink-tool databases should be treated as partial research indexes rather than a complete record of the web.