If you use the ls -li command (the -i option shows the inode number), you’ll see that its link count is 2. The link count is after the file permission field. //

You should not create a hard link to a directory

You can create a soft link to a directory but when you try to create a hard link to a directory, you’ll see an error like this:

ln: newdir/test_dir: hard link not allowed for directory

Why are hard links not allowed for directory? It’s because using hard links for directory may break the filesystem. Theoretically, you can create hard link to directories using -d or -F option. But most Linux distributions won’t allow that even if you are root user.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/210741/why-are-hard-links-not-allowed-for-directories
//

Bonus Tip: How to find all hard links to a given file

If you see that a file has more than one link count, you may get curious about the other hard links associated with it.

One way to find that is using the inode number of the file. You can use the ls -i command or the stat command to get the inode number.

Once you have the inode number, you can see all the links associated with it using the find command.

find . -inum inode_number