.edu links

How important are they?

[McMohan]

This lazy afternoon, searched Google "site:.edu my state". Got atleast 100 .edu sites of colleges located in my state. Next step, contact the webmasters and request paid links from those :)

Seriously, how important are those links? I am fairly sure, spending almost half the money spent on text link brokers, I can get links from those .edu sites. SEO in my city hasn't yet become all that familiar, and one can easily convince them we are only giving donations and you please acknowledge it with a link.

[alphacooler]

This is incredibly dishonest and furthermore wouldn't work. Universities don't just give out links. But by all means give it a shot. I would however recommend spending your time making a better site and getting natty links.

[arran]

Universities don't just give out links.

But their students do :)

Contacting students (not webmasters) for links has been discussed a couple of times before.

When i was at university my .ac.uk (UK equivalent to .edu) home page was PR5/6 and consistently ranked well.

The only problem is that students could be breaking university policy by using their webspace for commercial purposes.

arran.

[McMohan]

This is incredibly dishonest

Please explain me the ethics angle here.

I would however recommend spending your time making a better site and getting natty links

Building quality site is not an option, but a must. If a couple of .edu links to my site makes my site less vulnerable to wild Google mood swings, why not try?

[martinibuster]

>>>why not try?

Go for it. I'm not sure why they're more important apart from they might be in better neighborhoods than the average website on the web.

[inbound]

.edu or .ac.uk tend to be heavily linked to from authority sites and government. Links from these are great.

We have a client who legitimately has links from .ac.uk sites and enjoys a high PR7 homepage.

I'd guess that most people would swap a high PR7 for their current PR (please let's not make this a PR thread, it needed to be there for comparison)

[Justilien]

The issue I see with .edu's is the more SEOs go after them the less value they will carry in the long run. Just like everything else we do it will be de-valued. My advice is if you want .edu links go after the main sub-pages of the site. These are the least likely to get devalued. That way you will get the benefit of them into the future. It is pretty easy to devalue student pages.

Now the question is how do you get those college links. You could create some “high quality” content that a department or professor would want to link to. I have a site that has gotten some nice .edu’s and non-profits links by doing that. Plus, these links send traffic to my site. Another way is to interview a professor at a university, then publish it on your website. Most academics like to show off when they are published.

[McMohan]

Now the question is how do you get those college links

Volunteer to design the site for free.
Volunteer to maintain/host the site for free
Give a donation to the college you studied at

Just a few more ways I guess might help in getting a link.

[Algebrator]

Lots of professors keep resource pages (sometime with commercial section) - so , depending on industry, content doesn't have to be (entirely) free.
These pages are typically not well maintained. One thing you can do is point out broken links (haven't found one without them use Linkscan or some such tool) - they will be more likely to link to you.

A question - beside .ac.uk is there any other domain generally recognized as 'equivalent' to .edu?

[sugarrae]

>>>Universities don't just give out links

Bull. I've got them and so do many others. Create a quality site about something they have on their site and they'll link to you... not just students... I have links from professors, student clubs, and even one or two from the U's themselves (main site).

[bears5122]

They aren't as hard as you think. Many have resource sections that list anything from jobs to information for students. Run a check on the outbound links of some local universities, you'd really be surprised. I've recently done work on a site that has gotten 10 .edu links by simply e-mailing a specific department and requesting it.

If that fails, just harvest e-mails from the student pages and request a link for some beer money. :-)

[JuniorOptimizer]

I have a hard time believing that "any old link" from a page on a .edu makes any difference at all. Why would it?