Backlink (inbound link)
A backlink is a link placed on a third-party site pointing to yours. Search engines treat it as a vote of confidence, weighted by the referring site’s authority and its thematic closeness to your content.
In practice
Ten links from established bodies in your sector outweigh a thousand links from anonymous directories. Google penalizes link buying and artificial networks; durable links are earned with content that press or peers genuinely want to cite — original studies, data sets, free tools. The shortcut always costs more in the long run.