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Backlink

A link from another website to yours, treated by search engines as a signal that someone else found the page worth citing.

Links remain one of the strongest ranking signals, but the count matters far less than it once did. One link from a relevant, credible site is worth more than hundreds from directories nobody reads.

What a search engine reads is the pattern: who links, how relevant they are, what the anchor text says, and whether the profile looks earned or assembled. A sudden influx of unrelated links from unrelated countries is a recognisable shape.

Buying links violates Google’s spam policies. The exposure is not theoretical: it is the most common cause of a manual action against a commercial site.

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