Why Are Educational Back-Links So Valuable In Search Engine Optimization?
Posted Under: Search Engine Optimization
Educational back-links (.edu) have always been much more important to the search
engines because of their difficulty to obtain.
Educational back-links cannot be purchased by just anybody; .edu domains are strictly reserved for educational institutions.
If you as the webmaster would like to purchase an .edu domain in the United States, you must accredited by an agency working for the Department of Education.
Stringent policies are in place in other parts of the world, in addition to the United States, to ensure that .edu domains continue to maintain their credibility.
One of the reasons educational back-links are so valuable in search engine optimization, is because they are not easily attainable.
For a variety of reasons, educational back-links hold a great deal of link juice with Google, as well as the other search engines.
This makes them highly beneficial to any Search Engine Optimization campaign.
Although Google has not officially acknowledged how much additional weight they put on .edu links, you can be sure it’s substantial.
Acquiring educational back-links is not nearly as easy as building back-links from conventional websites.
Educational site webmasters do not eagerly provide their high quality links to just any website.
Forum signatures, guest blogging, commenting on blog posts, and the normal link building strategies that get links from webmasters of conventional .com or .org sites, are not as effective on .edu websites.
Webmasters of .edu domains are notoriously “picky” about which sites they link to.
This is probably due to the difficulty in their obtaining .edu domains, as well as their responsibility of maintaining website credibility.
Still, high quality educational back-links can be acquired if you are willing to put in the time and effort that is necessary.
The basics still apply to getting authority site educational back-links.
The more relevant your link, the more “link juice” it will provide to your website, so focus on .edu sites that are similar to the niche you are occupying.
If you place you focus on random .edu sites; your results will be the same as when you to focus on random .com websites.
If you try to get a .edu link from a sports site and your niche is in Internet marketing, the webmaster of the .edu site will probably label your link as spam and ignore it.
If you are running a fishing website, concentrate your linking efforts to an outdoor sports or fishing .edu domain.
A good way to find similar educational back-links to your niche is to check out what .edu links your competition has.
There are several ways to do this but the easiest is to download the SEO Quake toolbar for your Firefox browser or download some other backlink checker tool from the Internet.
Then all you need to do is enter your competitors domain URL to see how many .edu links they have pointing to their site.
Make a list of the educational back-links and try to acquire them from the same or similar .edu sites to increase your ranking in the search engines.
Make no bones about it, educational back-links are still extremely valuable in Search Engine Optimization.
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