Part 1: Shooting the facts and myths on .edu links.
Over the course of this two part article, we’re going to take a look at the facts and fantasies of acquiring a link from a .edu domain. I thought it might be worth simplifying something that’s becoming one of the great time and money wasters in the SEO world.
Now, as you’re probably aware, .edu is a top level domain reserved for educational institutions. It’s favoured by American universities. You’ll find it slapped on the end of your Harvards and Columbias. Despite this, a small handful of generic websites were successful in registering their .edu domains before it became a part of Educause - who subsequently shut up shop on new domain registrations.
What you have in theory is a small group of high authority websites, dominated by universities and education societies, with no leeway for spammers. And us marketeers, forever looking for trends in the SEO business, we assume that sites with a .edu domain are on the receiving end of a rocket sized Google boost due to those closed doors. It’s like a quality control, if you will. The very opposite of a mass-purchased .info domain.
If a site gets a link from a .edu domain, the chances of it being laundered or spammed are far slimmer than they are for your average public domain. Now while some cashed up Harvard professor can probably be heard laughing all the way to the bank as you read this, the .edu clampdown is something that we have to work around if we’re looking to establish our profile of high authority backlinks.
Or do we?
You see, the trouble with getting links from .edu domains is that they’re so closely monitored in the first place. They’re incredibly hard to get and there’s little or no place for inappropriate websites. By inappropriate websites, I don’t mean your Redtubes and casinos. I mean everything that isn’t painstakingly crafted on the topic at hand. Harvard simply isn’t going to link to your commercial website unless you can offer something which is of use, legitimate quality or in the dual interest of its audience. And if we could all offer something along those lines, it’s unlikely we’d be resorting to these means to get links!
So if we can’t get links from Harvard, what do we do? We naturally take a step down the ladder to see what else we can find. Where can we inject our link on another .edu domain and get away with it? The reality is that most universities will ignore your link request without so much as opening the header.
There is, however, one opportunity we can seize upon, but it’s likely to prove expensive. Universities often grant an online space to their students where they can post blogs, portfolios and general updates on their social activities. It’s become quite apparent to Google that increasing numbers of students are making a quick buck by selling links on their part of the network.
You could place your link in a student’s university blog and potentially funnel some link juice through to your money site, but how much of an impression are you really going to make on the search engines?
Most of these student subpages are a few directories deep and distinctly lower in Pagerank. You might argue that the .edu domain counts for more as Google loves its authority websites, but can we really prove that it’s any more helpful than a front page link on an authoritative .com?
No, we can’t.
One of the greatest myths about .edu link building is that one-way linking on a buried subpage will do untold wonders for your search engine performance. The only thing that’s going to send Google through the roof is a top level link from a respected .edu site. If you land on the Harvard homepage, your sales go up. That we can guarantee.
The difference between link juice for a student blog on a .edu domain and a student blog on a .com domain is open to debate.
It’s highly unlikely that Google decisively cares whether the domain ends in .com or .edu. Google cares about authority. It’s merely coincidental that so many .edu domains are packed with authority. Of course they would be!
I can tell you that Harvard would be a brilliant place to get links from even if it was placed on a .info domain. We should be looking at legitimate link authority rather than a desirable domain, if we truly want to leverage our link building campaign.
All that said, I’d be an absolute mug to turn my nose up at a genuine high quality .edu link. None of us can say for sure, but we can make an educated guess that there is indeed some extra link juice to be gained.
But it’s important to remember that:
- Not all .edu links are of high quality.
- The authority of the website is determined by more than a .edu domain.
- The financial rewards for an authoritative .com or .org domain are just as great.
I’ve heard of many instances where low quality .edu links have been sold at ridiculous prices. Hell, to purchase one of the original unsanctioned .edu domains, you’d now be expected to pay thousands of dollars. Maybe even HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars.
Don’t pay over the odds for a .edu backlink. In fact, don’t pay anything at all until you’ve read Part 2 of this authority backlink series.
That’s where we’ll be looking at competitive alternatives to the .edu domain, as well as the coup to end all. I’ll show you the Black Hat technique that’s allowed me to build a link profile featuring a small handful of PR7 and PR8 .gov sites.
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