Everyone seems to want a one-way link from an .edu domain.  And why not?  We’ve been told repeatedly about the value of an edu link in helping boost the reputation of a website.  There seems to be a few reasons for this.

First and foremost, .edu sites are perceived as reliable, reputable sites and excellent at providing accurate, current information. These sites also tend to be quite large, with larger schools and universities often having thousands of pages of information available.  Search engines reward size, and that positive influence tends to trickle down to the sites that are linked to them. Finally, a great number of .edu sites are time-honored presences on the web; they’ve been around since the early days of the Internet and have aggressively used their Internet presence.

With so many positives to have an incoming link to your site from an edu site, keep in mind that even these have varying degrees of worth. An incoming link from a professor’s personal page, for instance, would be more valuable than a link coming from a student’s page. You can always buy links, but there are more creative ways to get links that are also more effective – purchased links don’t usually provide as much weight as you’d like them to, and if you can get top quality links at no cost, you’re ahead of the game.

A few good ideas for getting inbound links to your site from edu sites might include:

• A “top 100” list that relates in some way to both your product (say, text books or calculators) and edu sites. A “Top 100 Best Engineering Schools” would be a good example – no school can resist letting people know they’re the best at something.
• Post college sports scores and information on upcoming collegiate events.
• Do a write-up on a particular college or university that touts the advantages of the school or something unique it offers – again, schools like good press, just like everyone else.
• Interview professors for content articles on your site. Most professors will be glad to link from their own site to yours, particularly if they have recently been published and are seeking good “word of mouth.”
• Review books or research done by professors at a college or university. If you sell vitamins and the bio-sciences department of a university is studying the positive effects of vitamins on certain diseases, it’s a great match.
• Populate your site with content that is valuable to students that edu sites might not provide. Calculators are always nice – for instance, a student loan calculator that helps students estimate how long it will take to repay loans. Information on everything from how to do laundry properly to learning to live on a budget can be valuable and may get you links from student resource pages.

Have you created some fascinating link bait that attracts edu linking to your site? Or do you provide content that colleges and universities seem to jump all over? We’d love to hear about it! Just post your success stories hear so that the rest of the link building community can benefit from your experience!

[tags] one way edu links, link bait, edu links, buy links [/tags]

Vertical Measures

Taking a closer look at what Google’s official stance is, you’ll find that Google doesn’t condemn outright companies who sell or buy links. In fact, they state on their site that, “Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.” And here is where Google’s new campaign runs into trouble. How does one decide what links are for “advertising purposes” vs. “manipulation of search results?” 

• The writer of the articles actually uses and endorses the products mentioned in the links
• The book publisher and the gardening supplies house have a reciprocal agreement
• The book publisher paid for a link
• The owner of the publishing house received a free load of fertilizer to try out (in hopes of being mentioned in a future book); he liked it; he thanked them with a link
• The gardening supplies company is owned by a man whose sister is a sales associate for the book publisher.

Vertical Measures