Many webmasters love .edu links without fully understanding the
benefits behind them. In a nutshell, it is not that an .edu back link will
do magical things with an individual’s site and sky rocket them to the
top of the search engine. It is more to do with the quality that is usually
reserved to .edu links.

Can .edu links be purchased?
Yes they can be, but the negative part is for only a short time. If you
notice, most universities usually have a paid section in which an
employer can enter in a job or intern description if they would like to
find potential workers or internees from their local university.
It is very common for the employer to have the option to enter in a url so
that the students who read the data bases can go to a site to fill out a
form or find more information about the listing. When I first realized this
I was ecstatic, I thought that I would have an easy and affordable way to
obtain links from credible authoritative sites very easily.
So, I started searching for other highly reputable .edu organizations that
I can post jobs in and was hoping to stick a link in there as well.
However, this short lived experienced took place years ago when I was
very inexperienced with search engine optimization but in short time I
realized that this would never work.
The reason for that is even if you do get a back link it will only be
temporary. The explanation for this is really straight forward--they can
not let all of the descriptions entered into the database stay there
permanently because it will accumulate overtime and take up a vast

amount of resources on the server.
They have set deadlines on how long a description will be listed in their
directory and after that time expires the description will be removed
along with the website url will be removed from the database for good.
So, this way is only a cheap and short way of obtaining a back link from
an .edu website and is nothing that will last in the long term.
Self hosted blogs
Some universities allow their undergraduate students to have a blog
hosted on the university’s server. Yeah, so you can try and find college
students and buy them off with a link but don’t waste your time.
Universities have quality score polices about their sites content and you
can’t use it for commercial purposes, it is not going to happen and it is
also against the tos for most of them.
Sure, you may be able to get a link temporary but that is a whole a lot of
energy invested into a short term and unreliable method. Yes, as you can
see I have tried to exploit every advantage that was presented in front of
me but they always seemed to be just one step ahead of me.
However, after time of testing and trying, I have found a couple of easy
ways to go about it that costs less and is a lot less hassle.

The Methodology #1:
What we are going to do is find free .edu blogs that includes the follow
attribute and comment on them. It makes sense to comment on blogs
that are within your niche market so I will show you how to search for
that.
However, before we get started we will need to understand some of the
basics about “blog commenting.” First, do not comment on blogs with a
short meaningless comment. More importantly, do not comment on a
blog with a short meaningless comment with a link right back to your
site within the comment!

Whoever made the first mass auto commenting software that allows
bloggers to mass spam blogs like wordpress, blogger, and etc with a
click of a button (literally) are complete dummies! Listen, very carefully,
auto commenting software are short term solutions.
They are very wide spread which makes them easy to detect which
means that their original purpose has lost its effect drastically.
With wordpress, there is an auto commenting detecting software known
as “askimet.”
This detects and deletes those useless spam comments. Also, if a
webmaster decides to mass spam a wide area of blogs then they are just
doing this for a cheap low quality source of traffic.
Most blogs come with the “no follow” attribute by default which means
that it does not pass page rank on to the specified areas of the site. So,
those links that are stuck within blogs that have the “no follow attribute”
will get ZERO link love but it can still very well generate traffic.
However, traffic is useless if it is not properly targeted and segmented
so that is why you shouldn’t waste your time commenting on blogs that
have no correlation to your blog for traffic purposes.
However, for link building purposes, it is not exactly going to hurt you

but I don’t recommend going around leeching links from low quality
sites that have no correlation to that of the theme of your site.
There is one technique that I will get to shortly that does collect links
from sites with a different theme but the urls are of high quality.
Ok, to find .edu sites within your niche market this is what you do.
Go to Google and type in the following query:
site:.edu *your niche* + blog
For example, if your keyword is “online business” type the following
query in:
site:.edu *online business* + blog
To tell you up front, if you have a site in a micro niche then finding .edu
links will most likely be kind of tricky. However, if you go with the
broader aspect of a niche market that relates to the theme of your site
then you will have a much higher success rate of finding .edu links for
your site.
Most of these blogs will be those that belong to professors or graduate
students at a specific university and a lot of them like enjoy comments
on their blog from interested readers. However, make sure to follow the
appropriate editorial guidelines when commenting on one’s blog and
you should have zero trouble acquiring a healthy dose of .edu links.
By using this one technique right here I was able to secure a link from a
blog hosted on the server from Harvard which is one of the most
decorated higher learning institutions in the world.

Must follow editorial guidelines when commenting on blogs
This is just common sense but I think that it is safe to say that most
bloggers don’t like when you comment on their blog just for the heck of
it.
They like when individuals comment on their blog and add to the overall
discussion of their site. So in short, don’t put inadequate comments like
“hi, great blog!” or “hi check out my website at:
www.whatevertheurlis.com.”
Do not put short comments that do not add to the over all value of a site
and don’t stick your website url within the body of a comment because
this will always decrease the chances of your comment getting approved
if the blog is moderated (and most of them will).
If the blog includes the follow attribute (which the Firefox plug-in will
show you) then all you have to do is stick the website url within the
appropriate section of the comment form (the place where it gives an
option for the commenter to enter a website url) and if your comment
gets approve you have just created an easy back link to your site from a
url that has a page trust in Google.

Methodology #2: “I spy”
You can make use of the “Seo for Firefox” plug-in to see what .edu sites
that your competitors are leeching links from. If you find the .edu sites
that link to them then you should be able to do what I call “reverse
engineering” to determine how your competitors are collecting links.

What you do is go to Google and type in the keywords that you are
targeting. After the top results generate then you should be seeing some
content underneath all of the listed websites.

You can then click on the Y! .edu page links to find the .edu sites that
link to your competition’s website. You can then add them on your
prospective list of sites that you can link to within excel.

when you think of .edu?
An education institution of some sort… usually a university. Well,
universities’ sites are known for providing credible news and
information. Why not, you sometimes have decorated professors that
obtained Nobel peace prizes for their work that could write for
universities and that is very hard credentials and credibility to beat.
Google tends to favor credible sites because what will happen is that
these sites will usually start to receive a lot of back links. When a site has
credible standing in Google they are commonly referred to as “authority
sites.”
Authority sites are those type of sites that when you search for in Google
they will have several listings from that website underneath the search
results, so, yeah, that’s one reason why webmasters want back links
from .edu sites… they tend to have thousands of quality inbound links
pointing to their root domain name and a lot of those links consists of
trusted sites as well.
They also have usually been online for lots of years usually 10+ and
have built up a trusted rank within Google. Remember, the age of a
domain name is something that Google gives prominence to as well. So,
that is another advantage of obtaining links from sites with an .edu
extension.
Also, another advantage that .edu links have compared to that of other
domain name extensions (with the exception of .gov sites) is that they
are not publicly available for anyone to register.
Actually, they are solely available for higher learning institutions which is

another reason why. edu urls are so credible, and that is that they are
not publicly opened for distribution and these domain names are not
strictly used for commercial purposes.
Have you ever seen an .edu extension used for a sales page? You can not
go to Godaddy or your favorite domain name registrar and purchase one
of these babies which bring me to my next question…