Got a backlink from a deleted .edu page and it still moved the needle

I snagged a link from a university site's old resource page last month, only to find out the page was pulled down two weeks later. Checked my rankings anyway and the page still climbed from page 4 to page 2 for a mid-tail keyword. Anyone else see value from dead or removed links, or is that just a fluke in my niche?

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jenny_coleman14d ago

Did Google already crawl and store the link before the page got deleted? I've seen this happen with cached pages too, where the link juice basically gets locked in once the crawler saves a copy. It's like the link becomes a ghost that still passes weight even though no one can click it anymore. Same thing can happen with archive.org snapshots if Google decides those matter for some reason. So it might not be a fluke at all, just a timing thing where you got lucky with the crawl schedule.