Amazing technique to get FREE .edu backlinks that is 100% ethical

Posted by Joe Whyte at 7:18 pm to Link Development

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One of the most interesting link development techniques unveiled itself to me today. Many link developers and SEOs might be a lil upset at me that such a great technique is not being used privatly for my own gain but in my mind I fell I should share this with the SEO community as I really doubte anyone else knows about this.

If you didn’t know, .edu backlinks are pretty darn coveted due to the high trust rank they have within Google. Most edu sites have quality inbound links, have been online for years and years and are a credible source of information to the search engines and to the community. At SEOmoz rand has a page strength tool that measures .edu links as well and assigns a particular value to how many you have coming into your site. It is safe to say that a .edu is a power link and can do a lot for your site within the search engines.

This is why services like text link brokers actually sell text link ads on .edus and you might have heard of .edu link campaigns where link developers aquire links on .edus by way of a presale page or purchasing a student page and placing a link on it. These methods are old, out dated, time consuming and unrealiable as a site can be reported for selling links or a student can remove your link at anytime.

Are you ready for the secret?…. Not yet!! Let me show you some interesting information. I want to show you the the power behind a .edu link. The following image is of a Google search of a drug called cialis. These internet marketers have used a .edu link to rank on the top page of Google for a very competitive drug. Although this type of technique is not one that I suggest (its a bit spammy) this example does show the shear power behind a .edu link.

Now that you know the power behind obtaining a .edu link and how coveted these links are I am going to show you somethign that took me about 5 minutes to do. I recently did a post on Joe Whyte that was asking for bloggers for a new project. I was doing some thinking and I started thinking about job postings like corporations do on monster and simplyhired etc. Then it came to me, what if I posted a job application for college students on there .edu? What would happen, is it possible and would it be SEO friendly? Well, to my suprise, it is!! Below is an image of a .edu that allowed me to post my blogging position I currently have available on their job system.

my first easy .edu link

As you can see my url is currently listed on the site and is relevant to the job searchers. See my link on this page. Make sure you check this pages source code out. You will notice a nice friendly SEO link in the source code. Don’t get crazy with this and please do not spam these engines. I do not condone this or promote spam whoever I do advise this technique for sites that are just starting out and looking for additional help in the office. Simply put out an ad next time on a local university hiring board. Try doing a google search like this.

I think this technique can be incorporated into your link development campaigns naturally and ethically and most importantly can have a huge impact on your serp results.

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75 Comments »

Damn you Joe for giving out ideas for getting links on .edu sites!! You’re supposed to be a goody goody WH.

Comment by Jon — May 24, 2007 @ 7:45 pm

Very good!

Comment by Tyler Dewitt — May 25, 2007 @ 2:58 am

“I do not condone this or promote spam”

You are just asking for it now. We’re going to see a dramatic spike in these types of links. Anyway, thanks for sharing this great post.

Comment by Daehee — May 25, 2007 @ 4:10 am

Thanks for the tip! As long as you’re really looking for interns, it’s a good way of finding help with SEO benefits on the side.

Comment by Karaoke Lover — May 25, 2007 @ 4:39 am

$MyAvatars 0.2$

[…] Now that you know the power behind obtaining a .edu link and how coveted these links are I am going to show you somethign that took me about 5 minutes to do. I recently did a post on Joe Whyte that was asking for bloggers for a new project. I was doing some thinking and I started thinking about job postings like corporations do on monster and simplyhired etc. Then it came to me, what if I posted a job application for college students on there .edu? What would happen, is it possible and would it be SEO friendly? Well, to my suprise, it is!! Below is an image of a .edu that allowed me to post my blogging position I currently have available on their job system. Weiterlesen… […]

Pingback by Neue Technik für Gratis edu Links :: Latha-Math.com — May 25, 2007 @ 4:59 am

“Your job will automatically be removed after four weeks”

Apparently, job listings aren’t permanent.

Comment by Halfdeck — May 25, 2007 @ 5:01 am

I have had great responses from .edu’s providing information that appeals to their target, but your technique above does add to that and gets the wheels turning even more. Great Post.

Comment by David — May 25, 2007 @ 5:14 am

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Pingback by Who Said That? Friday, May 25th | Create Business Growth: Free Tips to help you grow your business online and off! — May 25, 2007 @ 6:27 am

This sounds like a great push so long as it is not abused. Thank you for sharing.

Comment by Colbs — May 25, 2007 @ 6:38 am

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Pingback by You Shouldn’t Miss These - 5/25/07 » 10e20 - Search, Design & Social — May 25, 2007 @ 8:54 am

Thanks for sharing.

Comment by Chris Sandberg — May 25, 2007 @ 9:14 am

how is this spam? It’s impossible to spam cause you need to actually have a job prospect for the student. Generally schools are careful who they list. But alas, many have job postings hidden behind password protected logins….

Comment by Barry — May 25, 2007 @ 9:57 am

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Pingback by Friday Favorites 5/25/07 | Search Engine Optimization India — May 25, 2007 @ 10:29 am

[…] I’m astounded he had the time to get a new site up and running and post this entry about how to get links from .edu sites. Basically, he urges you to find .edus who have a job posting section and then post job openings. A […]

Pingback by Search Engine Optimization Blog » Will .edu Links Ever Lose Their Luster? — May 25, 2007 @ 11:48 am

Pingback by Will .edu Links Ever Lose Their Luster?-- Search Engine Optimization — May 25, 2007 @ 11:54 am

Impressive !

Comment by Aurélien — May 25, 2007 @ 12:21 pm

Great idea! Thanks for sharing with all of us, truly a treat.

Comment by TannerC — May 25, 2007 @ 2:05 pm

Pingback by Will .edu Links Ever Lose Their Luster? »Technology News | Venture Capital, Startups, Silicon Valley, Web 2.0 Tech — May 25, 2007 @ 3:15 pm

It’s easy to get natural EDU IBLs if you have good content. Don’t post a job listing if you don’t actually intend to hire someone.

Comment by Josh — May 25, 2007 @ 6:21 pm

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Pingback by Devalu.edu — May 26, 2007 @ 6:12 am

Well explained.

Thanks for sharing.

Comment by Chetan — May 26, 2007 @ 7:10 am

Nice tips.

Comment by Pankaj — May 26, 2007 @ 7:18 am

Pingback by Will .edu Links Ever Lose Their Luster? | My Wordpress Webblog — May 26, 2007 @ 9:46 am

Nice article, hope people won’t abuse that, thanks!

Comment by Video Tutorials Spot — May 26, 2007 @ 4:21 pm

[…] ethical idea posted by Joe Whyte and noted by Aaron Wall is posting job vacancies on career sections of school […]

Pingback by How to Get Free .edu Links at SEO Hong Kong | HK Search Marketing and Optimization Blog — May 27, 2007 @ 7:37 am

Hi Joe,

This is one of the best methods where we can start building links and I think it is very cost effective also. Smart piece of work.

Pradeep

Comment by Pradeep — May 28, 2007 @ 2:51 am

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Pingback by .edu домены by Блог Димка — May 28, 2007 @ 4:40 am

thanks for sharing valuable info!

Comment by spy phone — May 28, 2007 @ 10:24 am

Great post Joe, thanks for taking the time to share. It opens up a lot of new SEO possibilities . . .

Comment by Patricia — May 28, 2007 @ 11:23 am

Click through some of the comment links and notice that many of the sites don’t look like they are based in the US. There is a lot of enthusiasm for posting job listings on US .edu sites though…

Comment by PocketSEO — May 28, 2007 @ 12:27 pm

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Pingback by Free .edu blog posts for everyone by SridhaReena — May 30, 2007 @ 1:11 am

Very nice finding and nice post.

However, BUT

- how many “fake job posting” will this lead to?

- how many poor students will send their resumes to some “linkbuilding-india2007@gmail.com” address where some link money got this blog post to setup free .edu links

Is this 100% ethical ?

I doubt it.

best regards
presell page man

Comment by Presell Page Man — May 30, 2007 @ 10:04 am

outstanding. thanks for sharing

Comment by Jake — May 30, 2007 @ 6:47 pm

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Pingback by » SEO Secret: How to Get .edu Domain Backlinks the Ethical Way | Ant Onaf SEO, Internet Marketing, & Computer Support Blog » Blog Archive — May 31, 2007 @ 10:52 am

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Pingback by RealEduLinks Company Blog » Blog Archive » The power of .edu links — May 31, 2007 @ 11:51 am

This is a good tip, but I don’t know that it’s easier than finding a college student who needs a few bucks and then tells his friend “about a guy who’s got a website and will pay you to link to it from our .edu blog”.

I guess I’ll have to test this one out and see which one requires less work…lol

Don

Comment by Don@AffiliateWatcher — May 31, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

This is a great idea! Paying students to do backlinks. Should be inexpensive and the mileage should be great.

Comment by Ablewise Free Classifieds — May 31, 2007 @ 10:11 pm

Great post! Thanks for the tip.

Comment by Aoleon The Martian Girl — June 1, 2007 @ 1:34 pm

Interesting SEO tip.

Comment by People Finder — June 3, 2007 @ 8:30 pm

too bad these links are useless for serp in Google since their are short lived and devalued. Also most of these org sites are not robot friendly if followed at all. Good luck finding these few sites and wasting all these time to gain a few links that are probably going to be gone by the time your site is visited by by google and its update of your links is done.

PS Consult a SEO company if you are hoping to get any results.

Comment by -ddd- — June 5, 2007 @ 7:50 pm

Hi, about the student pages. They all have a ~ in the url to differentiate them from the main edu site. Eg a student page will be http://www2.someuni.edu/~student_name/main.htm so surely google will know that its a student page and not content form the actual college and thus devalue it? Ie most of them arnt actually indexed.

Comment by Paul — June 6, 2007 @ 12:32 am

That is one hell of a cheeky little trick, the only thing is everyone that has read this is going to give it a go and sites are going to click on to what is happening. Thanks for the tip though.

Comment by raubin — June 14, 2007 @ 3:38 am

Awesome tip. But regarding Paul’s comments, I have noticed a few student blogs which seem to have a good PR. I wonder how this works!

Comment by Adarsh Rangaswamy — June 14, 2007 @ 7:43 am

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Pingback by Who Said That? Friday, May 25th 2007 | Create Business Growth Offers... — June 14, 2007 @ 3:18 pm

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Pingback by Stephan Miller » How to get backlinks from an edu. site. — June 20, 2007 @ 4:21 am

This is a great idea! Paying students to do backlinks. Should be inexpensive and the mileage should be great.

Comment by Levitra — June 20, 2007 @ 1:51 pm

Right…its not indexed. I’d suggest acquiring a directory link for that page to make sure it gets indexed.

I’m not quite sure how much value a link from (even a .edu domain) a page without any inbound links for itself is worth.

Comment by SEO Sitemap — June 21, 2007 @ 10:42 am

Not to rain on the .edu parade, but this and related techniques have been around forever. You can argue ethics all day long, but the bottom line is if you are pursuing the technique because you are hoping to create a link that will appeal to an algorithm, then it’s dirty. Are you looking for interns or employees at .biz or .info or .crap domains? No? Case closed.

LinkMoses has spoken…:)

Comment by Eric Ward — June 26, 2007 @ 9:24 am

I agree with eric. I honestly do not think this particular type of link is all that powerful and by crappy sites spamming these engines it gives seo a bad name.

however this could be a tool in your seo arsenal if this is legitimate which I stressed in the beginning of my post.

Something that HybridSEM.com is doing is moving away from the old school link development to implement and integrate natural link building techniques utilizing social media and content and link bait.

however I have seen serious changes in PR and serp ranking by combining both old school link techniques like directory submissions etc along with social media.

That is why we have created HybridSEM.com

Comment by Joe Whyte — June 26, 2007 @ 9:44 am

This technique works for us, mainly because of the shortage of school leavers in Australia who have programmed in C++ during University, so we have to expand on our search area to find good junior programmers and the US is one place where we can do this. However most of the very large universities (with a page rank of 7+) tend to use a service to post jobs, rather than post them on their EDU domain itself (like Simplicity, Monster)… the trick is weeding out the schools that do post directly on their EDU domains. Also - for the comment about finding interns/juniors - most of the Alumni pages have career centers and as far as I can tell about US Universities you guys have a stronger allegiance to your college than you do your country so I think it is also a place for experienced workers too.

Comment by Stephanie Lee — July 3, 2007 @ 9:17 pm

Its really nice and you really explore vary nice thing but i have one questions is it no follow link or natural I mean search crawler count it??

Comment by windows vista tips — July 8, 2007 @ 8:55 am

Good Idea, but i agree, most of these are time stamped. I have a post on a gov site, but it expires after 4 weeks. Thanks for the info though.

Comment by Chris Conway — July 16, 2007 @ 6:10 pm

[…] This technique to get edu links is so easy, infact, I’m surprise that I didn’t even think of it a long time ago. However, I was lead to this idea from a friend and this technique has already been posted about. No need to re-invent the wheel, so head to Hybrid SEM to see their post about gather edu backlinks. […]

Pingback by The Link Bait » Get Free .edu Backlinks — July 30, 2007 @ 11:11 am

I recently made a page for one of the universities here in New Orleans and they wouldn’t let me put a link to my site on it, needless to say, I was disappointed. Mind you, I made the page to help with the Katrina mediation, not for the link.

I have been looking for a way to get a .edu link for my site for a while and this seems legitimate enough, thanks for the tip.

Comment by New Orleans SEO — July 30, 2007 @ 10:22 pm

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Pingback by Top Internet Marketing Blog Posts…Ever — July 31, 2007 @ 2:14 am

Hey Joe,
What a cool idea. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Now if you could figure out a script that would automatically repost every 4 weeks we would
really have it made!

Best!

Steve

Comment by Steve Renner — August 7, 2007 @ 8:58 pm

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Pingback by Quick Links for Monday — August 12, 2007 @ 12:20 pm

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Pingback by Weekend Reading for 8/18/2007 | Entrepreneurial Blog of Matt Huggins — August 18, 2007 @ 12:36 pm

good tips, thanks

Comment by Chata — August 25, 2007 @ 6:39 pm

.gov & .edu links are far from dead. For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.digits.com&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-36,GGGL:en - Digits.com - there are 5 out of the first 11 links are .edu and google lists links by owh has the highest rank also.

So this pr8 with 374,000 links and the most powerful links are from .edu sites proves that .edu links are powerful.

At this point we are developing 6 .edu sites and most of them have directories. http://www.adison.edu and http://www.nassonu.edu have donation based linking abilities.

Come see how powerful .gov & .edu links really are…

Comment by Preston — September 4, 2007 @ 1:48 pm

@Preston:

Those kinds of EDU links from fake universities will probably not provide value. Cyber Space Institute? Student login?

Comment by Bob — September 6, 2007 @ 11:42 am

I totally agree with Eric Ward & PreSellPage. Most of these links are worthless from a SERP perspective. If they haven’t been indexed or have any traffic at all, what value do you think Google will place on those links?

If you really want edu links, get creative on your site and give the schools a reason to link to you.

Comment by Arnie - Link Building Pro — October 20, 2007 @ 11:56 am