An .edu domain can’t just be bought outright by anyone.  These domains are reserved primarily for educational institutions located throughout the world.  In order to buy an .edu domain the owner of the website has to be accredited by an agency working for the Department of Education in the US, and elsewhere around the world other stringent policies are in place to ensure that .edu domains continue to be credible.

High Quality Backlinks

It’s a well known fact that high quality backlinks are essential in an SEO campaign and .edu links are the ideal links to try and get hold of in an SEO strategy.  It is thought (although it hasn’t been acknowledged by Google) that .edu links hold a lot of weight in the search engine rankings, and so getting a link from an .edu site is, if this theory is correct, highly beneficial.  Even if special accreditation isn’t given to .edu backlinks we can be sure that these sites are still credible and hence are worthy of including in a backlinking strategy due to the stringent process that a webmaster has to go through in order to purchase an educational domain.

It’s Not as Easy as It Sounds

If you’ve been focussing on building backlinks for a while you probably think you have the hang of things.  Guest blogging, forum signatures, blog commenting etc.  It is easy (if tedious) to gain backlinks from “normal” sites however the process isn’t so simple when it comes to educational domains.  .edu domains are renowned for being incredibly hard to get backlinks from as the webmasters of these sites won’t just link to anybody.  In fact their stringent policies have led to .edu links becoming known as the “holy grail of link building” and, well, it’s not hard to see why.

Are .edu Links Still Valuable?

When focussing on building .edu backlinks to your website you are probably wondering whether the time and effort that you are putting in is in fact worth it.  What we do advise everyone who is looking for .edu links to do is focus on sites that are in a similar niche to yours.  For example, if you run a sports website try and get links from an .edu sports domain.  Google has said on numerous occasions that the more relevant the link is, the more authority it is given when determining search results.  If you focus on random .edu sites you will have similar results to when you focus on random .com websites and the webmaster of the .edu site may also dismiss your link as spam.

Check Your Competitors

If you’re still not sure whether it’s worth the effort, why not check to see what your competitors are doing?  By using our .edu backlink checker tool you can enter the domain names of your competitors and see how many .edu backlinks they have.  If they have a few, you should look into getting some yourself in order to increase your search engine ranking.