.edu links - What They're Worth & How To Get Them

Hey Guys,

I'm pretty new here, so I thought I would throw a nice tip out there for you.

You may or may not know this, but it will definitely be useful for some.

Firstly, to the best of my knowledge, .edu links hold more weight than .com ones with Google. Not simply because of the different domain tld extension, but because the type of content they have.

.edu sites are generally very content rich sites that hold a ton of articles, advise etc.

Google uses LSI to help rank pages (you knew, right?) and part of the way this works is to associate the attributes of a site that has great content with that of an 'authority' site. LSI extends to nearly every aspect of the site: the links, anchor text, titles, meta tags, content, relative position of keywords to others, use of content in sentences, use of punctuation, type of language used...etc...etc

So, .edu sites are good because they hold great content and Google knows it.

This doesn't mean that you can set up your own .edu site, because it will stick out like a sore thumb. Plus it's easy enough to find already established ones.


Right, how do you get links from these .edu sites?


I have heard of limited success from people contacting a particular department of, for example, a college website and offering to write an article for them. In my experience, they usually say no - they've got a couple of thousand students to do this for them!

After some research, I found that the best way to get these links is use blogs. Find a .edu site that has a blog, and make a helpful, relevant comment with a link back to your site.


Finding these blogs can be a pain in the butt... unless you do it like this:

Using some Google Boolean searching you can focus in on the blogs... use this line of text and replace KEYWORD with the topic or theme you are trying to find blogs for:

site:edu inurl:blog "post a comment" -"you must be logged in" -"comment posting closed" -"comment closed" "KEYWORD"

That will more often than not throw up a good number of sites that you can post a comment to, but to find the ones with a high PR can take a while.

If you use this tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/

You can sort all the results by PR. Just throw in the search query there - it works pretty much the same as Google.


Remember to only post good content - most of the edu sites have comment moderation on, so they will only get approved if you add something to the site. Make it a few paragraphs, and make it relevant.

I hope this helps someone - you can get quite a few back-links, sometimes PR8, pointing towards your site.

Thanks,

Dave

 

Thats true.

I am student in one of the most selective schools in the USA and I am looking to sell links.

My site has nice UI, it does have a little content. It has page rank of 3. The school page rank is 9. i never gave the site any link, it just got a rank of 3 by itself.

I am looking for 50$ for each link from home page for one year. I will not link to adult sites. I have a page called link.html, I can link to you from it for 35$ per year.

Regards,
adi

 

I'm the webmaster of a PR8 .edu site, but professional ethics keep me from linking to my own pages

Darn ethics...

 

The site I am linking from is my own personal site on my school site, it is not my school site. If I were the webmaster, I will not do that for sure.

 

Understood - I assumed it was your own personal pages within the site you were referring to.

I just drool every time I see that nice, almost full, green bar on my site's home page.

 

gosh...that would be a hard one to maintain...too bad ethics can't just 'hide' every once in a while...lol

 

Excellent tip. rep added

 

Thanks for the rep Spring!

Yeah - it's a good one. It can take some time to find a good, relevant blog, post a comment and get it approved, but it's worth it

Dave

 

Most students have a spot on the campus web server...although their personal pages probably have a much lower PR than the university home page. You could probably talk students into giving you links.

 

Excellent tip IMO as well. Just added a little rep of my own. Good job.

Best;

Eric

 

Hello,
I have no idea about how go pass reputation, but I would like to say thanks for sharing this excellent tip.

 

Hey cucaracha,

To add rep to someone, just click on the symbol of the scales on the right hand side of a post that person made.

Dave

 

great info thanks a ton!

 

Nice one Frozen. It's certainly a good tip and if I could I'd like to add alternative/opposite perspective to that.

If you're going to take the time and effort to write a good quality comment on a edu blog that links back to your site, you should instead consider creating something on your own site that might be of value to certain sections or departments of edu sites in the first place.

By that I mean that the goal is to get just one page of an edu site to link to one page on your site. So by putting your linkbaiting hat on, and spending a bit of time crawling around any one particular edu site, it's often quite easy to come up with something that the edu site would be quite happy to link to.

In other words, look around the edu site, look for pages that have a little bit of content (that might be a close enough topic to your website) and with perhaps a few outbound links on them (although that's not necessary). Do a well written page or three on your own site with much more info on that subject, and then fire off a link request.

The bonus this way is that the content remains on your site, and if it is good enough for one edu, it's probably good enough for a lot more. The downside is that it might take up a bit more time than the blog suggestion from FrozenSolid above, with less immediate results.

Remember that the majority of pages on a edu site are information resources primarily for the students and faculty. If your website offers something that is just more of the same then they'll have no reason to link to you. Provide something that offers a valuable resource to the edu's visitors (even if it's just one page on one topic), and there's a good chance you'll get a link.

Phlegm...

 

This was really good information. Best to be sure to offer something worthy of the link back. Something just really great! I agree with you Phlegm, if it's good for 1 edu site, then it's good for 100... :> So that means I'll be a PR 9 in no time...

 

Hehe, I'm not sure about a PR9 scking, but work in a little anchor text, and No.1 in the SERP's is a distinct possibility!

Good luck,

Phlegm...