Links between sites are how search engines discovered and scored the web before anything else existed, and they remain the clearest external vote for a page. The modern reading is nuanced: a link passes weight proportional to the linking site's own authority and to how topically related it is. A mention in a relevant publication outweighs a hundred directory submissions; links that exist only to be counted get discounted or flagged.
The honest way to earn them is the slow one: content worth citing (original data, real definitions, tools), digital PR around actual work, and relationships in the industry. Buying links or renting placements violates the guidelines and is the kind of penalty that takes a year to recover from.
Related terms
Domain authority
The accumulated trust a whole site carries — Google's own version is invisible; the public metrics are third-party approximations.
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link — a description of the destination that search engines read as a relevance vote.
SEO
Search engine optimization — making pages findable, indexable and worth ranking: technical health plus content people actually want.
Organic traffic
Visitors who arrive from unpaid search results — the compounding channel that keeps working after the work is done.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
