How To Find and Get .Edu BackLinks for SEO

It is not a secret that backlinks from .edu domains help increasing your SERP (search engine result page) rankings. Since most .edu websites are universities and other educational foundations, it is a hard and time consuming process to get a high quality backlink from a high PR .edu domain page, but not impossible. I will tell you how to get it without any spamming.

The WRONG way of Getting .edu backlinks

I will first explain how most SEOs do this in a wrong way. Time to time, an .edu page is discovered in net where you can leave comments with dofollow and they turn into link farms of viagra type links after a short time. What is the sense of having a link with other thousands? No matter it is dofollow or not it is still spam and at the end, it will hurt your rankings.

The CORRECT way of Getting .edu backlinks

You should behave exactly what big players in your niche are doing this. Since I own a couple of gadget and technology related sites, closely track highly reputed sites like gizmodo.com, engadget.com etc.

Since universities are for scientific and technological development purposes, you will see lots of projects revealing on the pages of students and academical staff. Gizmodo and Engadget sites closely track such activities and write on their blogs if there is something really unique and attention getting. As a result, some .edu pages give them a backlink mostly in Press Coverage sections of their pages.

You should do the same. For a technology blog, first find the research or project on .edu site and then write a comprehensive article about it. It should be very well written. Then, email them saying that you have made a Press Release. Surely, not all of them will backlink to you. But, after some time, you will notice that a few .edu sites really give backlinks to your pages. The most important part is to keep unique high quality content. Even you don't get a backlink, there is nothing to worry. You will still get free search engine traffic for the quality of your article and possible low competition of scientific topics.

How to Find .edu Sites Pointing a Domain

It is very simple using Yahoo Search. Type this.

linkdomain:mysite.com +site:.edu

Just replace mysite.com with the site you are investigating. For Gizmodo, it would be ;

linkdomain:gizmodo.com +site:.edu

Voila! There are over 4,000 result pages pointing to them. Think twice the reasons why not every gadget site can't compete them. Just check where their backlinks are coming and which .edu sites like to be press-covered :)

I put an example screenshot below a backlink of Gizmodo from a PR 5 page about a newly developed low cost 3D system. It was a perfect target to grab a backlink.

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DDisplay

As you can see Gizmodo get super link juice for keywords "3D", "Technologies" and a combination of them for exact match searches.

If you further do an even broad search in Google for 3D technologies phrase, notice that Gizmodo takes the second place beating 51,000,000 result pages !

Guess with what page this great achievement comes ?!