Are .edu Links Still Valuable in an SEO Campaign?

SEO BricksAn .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.






14 comments

  1. February 7th, 2012 14:12

    I believe it is still valuable. Among the popular TLDs, .edu is one of the most valuable to build link and reputation, but of course those that have the same niche with your site.

    Reply

  2. February 13th, 2012 10:15

    great post about edu backlinks..

    Reply

  3. March 19th, 2012 4:01

    This really was an interesting post. I subscribed to your RSS feed. Hope to see more from you very soon.

    Reply

  4. June 14th, 2012 18:27

    Keep up the wonderful work , I read few articles on this web site and I think that your site is really interesting and has got bands of great info .

    Reply

  5. August 1st, 2012 21:31

    Thank you for .edu backlink checker tool !

    Reply

  6. September 15th, 2012 11:48

    it’s pretty hard to get backlinks from .edu domains

    Reply

  7. September 23rd, 2012 18:09

    Thanks for your information. Now, I will work hard to make my website rank increasing significantly, especially alexa rank. Maybe you can give me an advice for my websites

    Reply

  8. October 10th, 2012 11:51

    Yes education links still valuable in an SEO campaign? I am still using .edu links for my SEO. education links are cheap then other links.

    Reply

  9. October 16th, 2012 14:18

    Great information, will be using the tips in our next SEO Strategy

    Reply

  10. November 9th, 2012 20:35

    The million dollar question is How to get backlinks for such high authority websites?
    Do comment links matter?

    Reply

  11. December 11th, 2012 18:58

    thank you for your kind information.pls share like this

    Reply

  12. February 14th, 2013 11:43

    Hi,

    I remember back in 2007, we have been optimising a website of a UK based Coach Company, a blog post has been picked up by a Chinese education website and we have seen an overnight dramatic change in rankings – This post was there on their website as they have been encouraging their students to hire that coach company as they found the entire website, company location, customers testimonials and so on positive enough – They have made a contact with that coach company to see if they can offer some great deals when they visit London/UK – And that one link has definitely made a huge difference

    As an SEO, I very much believe that writing useful information on your website and blog, producing a good video as a tutorial or “how to” information can attract much more links.

    @Amanda – Blog links can help if they are coming from the relevant websites – Avoid those blogs with thousands of backlinks where people had left thousands of links of their own and their customers, look at the pagerank, even if it will not help, it may still help you get some clicks/visitors (website traffic in mind)

    Forget the search engine’s, optimise your website for people! and it will work out

    It always worked in my case. 🙂

    Kind regards,
    Luqman Qadir

    Reply

  13. April 29th, 2013 8:34

    Do you recommend buying .edu links over spending the time & hassle trying to find a webmaster to link to you?

    Reply

  14. January 19th, 2014 15:20

    The .edu links are still valuable ! thank you for the seo tools !

    Reply

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