ble banner 250 How To Get Edu Backlinks
We all know the importance of link building when it comes to finding search engine ranking…

…and .edu and .gov backlink have been touted as the ‘holy grail’ of backlinks.

The main reason for this, is because only education institutions and Government organisations are allowed to own these domains, and the thought is that these are ‘authority’ organisations  – and should be unbiased with the way they link out to other websites.

That being said, there are a couple of simple ways to get .edu (and to a smaller degree .gov) backlinks without having to run a website of one of these extensions.

Types Of .Edu Backlinks

If you are looking for ways on how to get .edu backlinks, then let me first share with you the different types of edu backlinks available and then we will take a closer look at how you can get your fair share of them for your niche sites.

  1. Edu Blogs

    A lot of Education institutions give their staff and students access to blogs on their domain. While a lot of these have closed comments or moderation – it is possible to find blogs that allow comments (and sometimes even anchor text backlinks).

  2. Edu Forums

    Specific educational institutions create forums of sub-domains and folders, to allow their students to converse. However, since they usually just use standard forum software like vBulletin, anyone can register – so there is the possibility for profile backlinks.

  3. Edu Wiki’s

    Wiki’s became popular with Wikipedia. However, I have found that a couple of schools and universities have taken it upon themselves to create their own Wiki’s, and there is the possibility for you to get a link back from these also.

Now, these are the different types of educational backlinks that you can get, but the next questions is, ‘How To Get Edu Backlinks‘?

How To Find Edu Backlinks

Now, it is quite simple to find out where a website is getting their backlinks from, and one simple search will allow you to find out more specifically – where websites are getting their ‘edu backlinks‘ from!

There are two strategies we can use to get this done. Find based on a specific search criteria, or search based on a specific website. Let’s look at how to do both.

How Google Helps You Find Edu Blogs (That You Can Comment On!)

Alright, what we are looking for is educational blogs that allow comments – and are related to our niche. Here is the search phrase you will need to use (I’ll explain it all below)

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “niche”

If you copy the above search phrase into Google and exchange the word ‘niche’ with the niche of your blog, you will get a nice lot of different .edu blogs that you can leave comments on.

Now before you get too excited, a lot of them do not actually approve comments so you will have to check each one individually to find the ones that actually allow comments to get through.

Back to that code:

site:edu’ – tells Google that we are only looking for .edu domains.

inurl:blog “post a comment” – only shows blogs that allow comments.

-”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” – this refines the search to remove blogs that have closed comments or require you to log in to comment.

“niche” – This is where you put your niche, making Google only show edu blogs that include that word or phrase.

The only problem I have with this method is that you have to weed through a lot of blogs to find ones that actually will approve your comment.

That being said, even while researching this post, I managed to get a couple of backlinks on some major university and institution websites.

Find Edu Backlinks That Other Sites Have (So You Can Too!)

The other option is to look at your competitors websites and find out if they have edu backlinks – and where they are getting them from.

To do this I start out by opening up Market Samurai and checking the ‘SEO Competition’ for the top 10 results for a keyword and see if how many backlinks each websites have from educational domains.

I did this for the search term ‘paid surveys‘ for one of my niche sites.

The result is something like this:

edu backlinks How To Get Edu Backlinks

(You can get a free 12 day Market Samurai Trial to complete this step)

If you look in the far right column, you will see it titled BLEG – this means ‘Backlink Education/Government’.

So from this, we can see that 3 results in the top 10 of this search term have links coming in from Educational or Goverment websites (these could be blogs, forums or wiki’s) and allows us to know which websites to use our next Google search phrase on.

linkdomain:http://www.website.com/ +site:.edu

Using the search phrase above in Google, just substitute the domain in the phrase for the url of the website that you have that has edu backlinks.

Now, you may get more or less results in Google than are showing in Market Samurai – but what it does is it gives you a great starting point to find:

  • Edu Backlinks That Niche Websites Have Gotten Links On!

This is a great way to get edu backlinks, but it is important to remember that this is just one portion of your link building, and you should be getting a diverse range of backlinks from an assortment of location and website types ( and don’t forget to shake up the anchor text!).

I hope this has been helpful.

A great tip to speed up this process is that when you find some of these websites that accept your backlinks to create a bookmarks folder, or if they are blogs – subscribe to them. So that you already have a swipe file of these links ready for next time!