In this article, we will focus on links that come from websites ending with .edu, these are educational websites.
Experienced bloggers and webmasters know that .edu backlinks are very important for the rankings in search engines, they “are considered the holy grail of all links”. Why? Simply because .edu websites are trusted; Google thinks that this kind of external link is relevant. Note that these educational websites are not lucrative, which is why it is impossible to buy these precious links.
Furthermore, getting .edu links is difficult and time-consuming, but it is a worthwhile practice because you will funnel the .edu authority from their pages to yours simply by mentioning your website. In this article, you will learn how to build your audience with .edu forums, blogs, and wikis.
Tip: A real example is Harvard.edu linking to research-based blog posts by industry experts. Even one contextual link from a top university can help a page jump from page 5 to the top 10 results. Case Study: A UK-based education SaaS brand earned 5 .edu links through scholarship listings and improved organic traffic by 120% in 6 months.
Do-follow links
“Do-follow” is simply an internet slang term given to a link that is not “No-follow”. But what does No-follow mean? It is an HTML tag given to links that suggest search engines should not follow this link. In other words, even if it can bring you visitors, No-follow links are normally not considered by search engines. This is why it is very important to get Do-follow links. However, there are no apparent differences between a dofollow and a nofollow link. To see this difference, you must look at the code. You know that this link is NoFollow because of the tag “rel”:
Tip: A software company managed to increase its domain authority from 18 to 32 by replacing low-quality nofollow links with 40 contextual dofollow links from academic resource pages. They saw a 70% increase in referral traffic from those .edu sources.
Sources of links
Now you know that it is better to have .edu and DoFollow backlinks. But where can you find them? Of course you can find lists of .edu blogs on the internet, but how do you find your own niche? The answer is simple: find your niche with Google. To do this, you will need to use commands of search engines. You can find all the site-specific searches in the Google web search support.
Here are the commands that are important for .edu backlinks:
site:.edu – Google will only display websites that end with .edu.
site:.edu inurl:blog – The search engine finds all .edu websites that have the term “blog” in their URL.
site:.edu inurl:blog “your niche” – With this search you can find .edu blogs in “your niche”.
Tip: A digital marketing student used the command site:.edu inurl:resources “marketing tools” and discovered 14 university resource pages where he submitted useful tools. He received 6 dofollow links, leading to a 40% increase in signups for his marketing tool dashboard.
Forums
It can be very interesting to get backlinks from forums, these types of links are highly valued by Google and other search engines. However, don’t spam, this can be degrading for your brand. Furthermore, spam and non-contextual links are not considered by Google.
Tip: A SaaS founder actively participated in a US-based university entrepreneurship forum and answered student queries. Within 3 months, he received 100+ targeted visitors monthly from forum signatures and generated 12 paid subscriptions (without posting promotional spam).
Wikis
Wikis became popular with Wikipedia. Most universities have one. This is a very good way to get backlinks by editing/creating pages and helping the community. However, most wikis have NoFollow external links. But this is not a problem, because if Google analyzes that the links on a website are relevant, it will index them even if they are NoFollow. This is the case for Wikipedia and probably for other .edu wikis.
Tip: A travel blogger contributed geographic data to a university wiki. Even though the link was nofollow, the page ranked #1 for a long-tail keyword and brought 600 monthly visitors from Google, proving the indirect benefit of nofollow authority.
Blogs
A lot of schools give their staff and students access to blogs on their domain. You can get backlinks from these websites by guest posting or by commenting.
First, guest posting. This is a technique which consists of writing articles for a website or a blog and putting a link to your own pages. Guest blogging can bring you targeted visitors, but not only. Google considers these links as very relevant because they are in the content of the article.
Using comments is another good way to get backlinks with blogs. The advantage of this technique is that it takes less time, but your links will be less relevant. Furthermore, it is very difficult to find blogs in your niche with DoFollow comments. One can use CommentLuv in some cases.
Tip: A fintech startup wrote two guest posts on a university economics department blog and gained a single dofollow link per article. Those two links helped their landing page jump from position 24 to 6 in just 45 days, resulting in 300+ organic leads.
My personal list of .edu websites
This is my personal list of DoFollow .edu forums, social networks, websites, and blogs. All you will need to do is follow the tutorial corresponding to the website in order to get your links. Don’t forget that the more you post useful comments and posts, the more your links will be relevant from the perspective of search engines and users.
Academia (pagerank 7) – This is a website created for knowledge sharing. First, register as an independent researcher and complete the forms. When this is done, connect and click on the name of your blog on the upper right. Then click on “Add Websites” on the bottom left.
CGD Forum (pagerank 5) – This is a modeling forum where you can post DoFollow links directly in your posts.
Rohodec Bboard (pagerank 3) – This is a forum where you can get DoFollow backlinks.
CBL Mit Forums (pagerank 2) – This is a DoFollow phpbb forum. You can get backlinks by completing your profile and posting topics.
Tip: A small SEO agency consistently contributed answers to Academia.edu discussions and linked to relevant guides. Within 6 months, these posts generated 1,200 referral visits and two consulting clients worth $10,000 in total revenue.
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