8x Ways To Build Powerful Edu Backlinks

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Getting an edu backlink from an accredited university or school is not easy.

But when you get one… it’s definitely worth it.

Google doesn’t treat all links the same. Some links are valued as more trustworthy and therefore have more authority.

More authority = higher rankings.

So I’m going to show you 8 different ways to start building edu backlinks today!

PRO TIP: Use the free backlink blacklist to make sure you’re building good links

What Are Edu Backlinks?

Edu backlinks are links from a domain that has the .edu extension. Edu stands for education and not just anyone can get an edu domain.

To get an edu domain you need to get permission from a government body that verifies that you are a legitimate education provider.

Example Edu Domain

That is why Google places more value and trust in a link coming from an edu domain than it otherwise would.

PRO TIP: Before starting any link building campaign, it’s best to determine how many backlinks you need to rank.

How Valuable Are Edu Backlinks?

Edu backlinks often take a lot more work than getting a link from a normal .com site.

But:

Here’s why it’s worth the time and effort to get edu backlinks for your site….

Edu Sites Usually Have Higher Authority And Great Reputation

Most academic institutions that have edu domains have been around for a while.

They often have large backlink profiles from a variety of trusted domains. This means that edu domains usually have very high domain authority.

Think about it… educational organisations produce a lot of quality content. This kind of content can include:

  • News about what they’re working on
  • Academic achievements
  • Sporting achievements
  • Research papers
  • Breakthrough technology

And so much more. This means they are often publishing content that naturally attracts links from other reputable sources.

high authority edu website

Education sites often attract free backlinks from other powerful domains because of:

  1. The link-worthy content they produce.
  2. The reputation they have amongst the public.

How many times have you seen a news site mention a university or school?

When you get an edu backlink, it’s not just about the fact that it’s from a trusted edu domain. The link itself also comes with a lot of authority behind it.

This is also true if you get a gov backlink.

Edu Backlinks Are Not Created From Link Schemes

Link schemes are projects specifically used to generate links. Edu backlinks are almost impossible to create from link schemes.

blog commenting link scheme

You need to work hard to build a relationship with the person who controls the edu domain. There is no “link exchange” or simply listing your site in a directory. You need to:

  • Provide some value.
  • Create a piece of content worth the link from the edu site.

Not Everyone Can Get An Edu Backlink

Link building is hard enough on its own- Finding high authority websites, contacting the owner and negotiating a link isn’t easy work.

Now think about this:

How many .edu domains are there online vs the number of .com domains?

Example Edu Domain Extension

Because there are fewer edu backlinks available, to begin with, your chances of getting one decrease significantly.

You can see why edu backlinks are hard to build (and why they are so worth it).

The truth is not just anyone can build them and frankly it requires:

  • Special skills
  • Patience
  • Lots of practice.

Getting An Edu Backlink Is The Ultimate Proof That Your Content Is Trustworthy

Edu backlinks by nature have more authority in the eyes of Google. Organisations with edu domains are considered by Google to be:

  • Experts
  • Authorities
  • Trustworthy

Educational organisations tick all of the EAT metrics that Google loves so much.

Naturally, all of the content they produce makes Google’s heart beat faster (and algorithms rank higher).

Because a link from one site to another is a signal of trust, you receive all of that glorious authority with each edu backlink that you get.

Your site grows in authority because of it – and Google will reward you with better SERP positions.

GROWTH HACK: Sign up for my FREE link Building training.

8x Strategies To Help You Build Edu Backlinks

Building powerful edu backlinks is as much an art as it is a science.

To be successful you need to approach it with the right mindset. You can’t pitch guest blogs at scale and expect to pick up some nice edu links.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Your goal should be to build stong relationships with the site managers and/or the staff of the organisation.

With that said, here are my 8 best strategies to build edu backlinks.

1. Get Listed On Resource Pages

Method #1 can be considered the guest post of edu backlinks.

Lots of educational organisations have “resource pages“. This is similar to a blog page.

Here’s where the difference lies:

Topics aren’t always centred around one specific niche like most blogs are. Education resource pages usually cover a bunch of niches that:

  • Staff
  • Sudents
  • Partners

…are interested in.

edu website resource page

If you find the right organisation with a community that you can provide value to, you can pitch them a piece of content. Here’s how you find these opportunities.

Go to Google and type in the following:

site:.edu + niche keyword + inurl:resource

finding resource page edu backlinks

This will bring up a list of sites with .edu domains that have:

  1. Resource pages
  2. Post content similar to the niche keyword you typed in.

Take a look at previous posts so you get a better idea of what kind of content they like. Then, just find the contact email address of the manager and pitch to them!

You can learn more about this strategy with my resource page link building strategy.

2. Offer Discounts To Staff & Students

Everyone loves a discount.

You can provide discount offers to staff and students at educational organisations. There are actually two benefits to executing this tactic.

Lots of colleges and universities have dedicated pages on their website that show places where students and staff get discounts.

This is a great way to get the edu backlink you’re after.

student discount page

By offering discounts you should be able to get some sales as well.

Not bad, right?

The only thing you need to have is a physical product or service that would be attractive to students and staff. If you have that, you are good to go.

To find discount pages from edu organisations, go to Google and type in the following:

  • site:.edu “student discounts”
  • site:.edu “staff discounts”
  • site:.edu “discounts”

find student discount pages

Open up a few of the pages and look at the offers that are listed on the page.

Then, create an offer that works well for that page and reach out to the person who manages the website to tell them about your discount.

3. Create A Scholarship For Students

This is a much higher risk strategy because it’s been on Google’s radar before but it does allow you to build links while giving back and that is a rare opportunity to consider.

You see, lots of students want to go to college but simply can’t afford it.

Scholarships have become a big thing for colleges and students alike. Most colleges and educational institutions have a scholarship page.

Note: This edu backlink tactic is going to cost you more than usual.

For this tactic, you are essentially providing some financial help to students to help them pay tuition for college.

In return not only will you be helping students with their tuition payments, but you will also receive a backlink by being listed on the scholarship page.

If you play this smart you can even get multiple edu backlinks.

donor scholarship page

Google the following:

  • site:.edu “scholarships”
  • site:.edu “financial aid”
  • site:.edu scholarships inurl:donor

You will see a list of results that are edu domains that have scholarship pages.

find donor scholarship pages

Now you need to browse the pages to see what scholarships are listed. Once you have an idea of what people are offering, it’s time to create a similar scholarship.

Create a page on your own website advertising scholarship opportunities that you are presenting.

The next part is important. You need to reach out to:

  • Multiple colleges
  • Relevant academic institutions

…to let them know about your scholarship opportunity.

You also want to tell them that you are happy for them to link to your scholarship page from their website.

You could potentially bag a bunch of edu backlinks as each college is likely to list you on their site.

Which college would pass up free money for their students?

4. Interview Prominent Faculty Members

Lots of professors, lecturers and teachers maintain a blog on edu domains.

These prominent faculty members love to link out to interviews and articles they have been featured in.

This creates an excellent opportunity for savvy link builders like you. Ideally, you want to:

  1. Find these faculty members.
  2. Reach out to get their opinion on a relevant topic.

For example, if you are writing a piece of content about the “effects of social media on young people“, you can reach out to a relevant professor to ask for their opinion.

How do you find these potential professors?

Simply head over to Google and type in the following:

  • Site:.edu + keyword
  • Site:.edu organisation behaviour inurl:blog
  • Site:.edu organisation behaviour inurl:news
  • Site:.edu organisation behaviour inurl:research

finding faculty members to interview

Depending on the keyword you searched for, you may see a lot of the search results for courses or programs offered by a college or university. That’s fine.

You just need to dig deeper into the SERPs to find the results you are after.

faculty teacher

Don’t stop at just one faculty member.

Find a bunch of faculty members from different academic institutions and get a comment from all of them.

The more comments you get the more link opportunities you have.

Once you get a few replies, you just need to:

  • Create the content.
  • Mention each faculty member’s quote.
  • Publish the content on your site.

Then, email each faculty member, let them know the content is published and thank them again for their contribution.

And this is the most important part:

At the end of the email let each faculty member know that you are happy for them to share the content on social media and link to it from their site.

This is where you get the result you came for!

5. Mention Edu Bloggers In Your Content

There are tons of bloggers out there who have been assigned to consistently write for their school or college website.

Most of the time these bloggers spend ages producing content that is underappreciated.

But you know what? You have the power to change that and snag yourself a high DA edu backlink while you are at it.

Here’s how:

Start by identifying bloggers for educational websites. You can usually find their work on:

  • The college blog.
  • The website resources page.

Find one of their published pieces of content and mention it in one of your own blogs.

Edu Blogger Example

An example of the mention is this:

“Here is an interesting article written by [name of blogger] from [website URL of edu website] and they have found…”

The key to success with this tactic is making the mention seem very natural.

Once you publish the blog and mention the edu blogger, you need to immediately get in contact with them.

Find their email address and let them know that you mentioned them in your blog.

Make sure that you explain that their article was excellent – so good in fact that you linked to the article and gave them full credit.

Don’t forget to conclude the email by letting them know that they can share your blog on their website or social media.

6. Create A Careers/Jobs Page On Your Site

When executed well this strategy can attract a number of edu backlinks.

The goal of any educational institution is to educate its students. After students complete their education – what do they want next?

A Job– so they can pay off their student loans…

Lots of educational organisations will have career pages where they list potential job opportunities for students.

University of Texas Careers Page

So, if you have jobs that current students or students just completing their education could fill, you have a chance to get a number of edu backlinks.

To be successful with this strategy you’ll need to have a few job opportunities open.

Putting up a careers page with one job opportunity isn’t going to cut it. If you don’t have full-time/part-time jobs available you can list potential internships.

Create a careers page on your website where you list:

  • All of the opportunities that you have open.
  • What you are looking for in a candidate.

After you have created a career page, contact relevant educational institutions and let them know that you have a careers page and often have opportunities for current students or graduate students.

Tell them that you are more than happy to share this on their website and link to it.

The benefit of this tactic is that you can create one page and reach out to lots of colleges and schools.

This allows you to acquire a number of edu backlinks in one go.

7. Take Advantage Of Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of the most underrated link building strategies.

This tried and tested method can land you really high-quality link placements while also making you look like a superhero.

There are two keys to success with this method:

  • Finding quality broken links
  • Having quality content to replace them with

Ahrefs is the best tool for broken link building. It helps you find quality broken links fast and at scale.

Here is how the broken link building method works:

Use Ahrefs Open Site Explorer to crawl any website you want a link from. Filter the crawl results for 404 links.

broken 404 links

This provides you with a list of potential link opportunity placements.

Next, use Wayback Machine to see what used to be published on the broken link.

wayback machine

Now you have everything you need in place.

Just recreate the same content in your own words or use a piece of already written content that closely fits the topic.

Once that’s all done just reach out to the website manager and let them know they have a broken link and offer your piece of content as a replacement.

Check out my complete broken link building guide for more information on this strategy.

8. Take Advantage Of Alumni Pages And Associations

Schools and universities often like to keep track of their alumni.

Whenever alumni achieve something they feel is worth promoting, they write a piece of content about it on their site.

alumni page

This provides an excellent opportunity for you to get an edu backlink from schools or colleges that you attended.

Find out if your previous colleges or schools have alumni pages. If they do then this is probably the easiest way to get an edu link.

The first thing you need to do is establish something considered newsworthy that you can leverage. Newsworthy content can include:

  • Projects you have been working on
  • Discoveries that you made
  • Events that you have run
  • Research that you published
  • Interesting case studies

It just has to be something that the school would consider an achievement.

Reach out to your alumni association and let them know what you have been doing. They will likely be excited to publish a piece of content about you.

Make sure you mention the success you’ve had is partly due to the education they provided (only if it is true of course).

This is exactly what they want to hear and can significantly increase your chances of getting published.

A Few Things To Remember About Edu Backlinks

As you can see there are a number of great ways to build edu backlinks.

But:

Before you get on your way and build some for yourself, there are a couple of things to remember…

Not Only Ivy League Colleges Have The .Edu Extension

This might seem obvious.

But edu links don’t just come from the huge colleges that you read about on the news. There are tons of places to get edu backlinks from:

  • Schools
  • Universities
  • Community colleges
  • Art institutes
  • Sport academies
  • Religious seminaries

different edu backlinks

The list goes on and on. This is good news for you because you have a range of different organisations to approach to get backlinks.

Getting An Edu Backlink Is Hard Work

Getting edu backlinks is not for the faint of heart.

That’s why so many people never bother to chase them. It can take a long time and effort just to secure one placement.

But that one placement is worth every penny.

Hard work pays off

Don’t forget – only use these tactics once you’ve built a bit more of a brand and authority around your site.

Otherwise, the chances of you scoring an edu backlink are very low

Most education organisations only want to link out to trusted sites, so if your trying to push your 100% Amazon affiliate site that only has “best” product type posts it’s unlikely you’ll gain traction.

Work on growing the brand of your own site and start building relationships with the right people to secure a placement.

Getting An Edu Backlink Doesn’t Necessary Mean You’ll Rank Better

Here’s the truth.

Getting an edu backlink doesn’t guarantee that your website will skyrocket to the top spot.

Google ranking funny meme

Google has never officially said that edu links are worth more than any other link.

But SEO research and testing seem to show that edu links can improve your rankings more than the average .com link.

In SEO there is no single quick fix or super-secret to getting really high rankings.

You need to be consistent with your SEO work, adding edu link building to your overall strategy.

Don’t Focus Your Strategy On Building ONLY Edu Backlinks

A quality link building strategy hinges on a diversified link profile. That means you don’t just want to focus on only building edu backlinks.

You want to place links from a variety of relevant websites with different top-level domains.

Remember: Edu backlinks provide the most benefit when you already have an established backlink profile.

Wrapping It Up

So there it is.

All the white hat link building strategies you need to build your own high authority edu backlinks.

While it takes a lot more time and effort than other link building activities, it is definitely worth the time.

build edu backlinks

Choose 2 tactics from above and work at them until you get the results you want. This is what will separate you from the pack.

Want help with high authority link building?

LinksThatRank builds the best links across the internet. They have a strict quality control process that ensures every link they place moves the needle forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

An EDU backlink is simply a link mentioned from a . Edu domain. Edu domains are websites of schools, universities, and other official academic institutions. These links are very popular for several reasons. Indeed, they can help you boost your domain/page authority and also increase your visibility and your traffic considerably.
One of the most efficient strategies that I can recommend to get Edu backlinks is to "start locally". If the site you are trying to build links to is a local business, start by targeting local institutions, schools and colleges. Look for sites that include something like “Local Resources” or “Local Businesses” and ask them to be included.
Yes, Edu backlinks are very good for SEO. As I mentioned earlier, Edu backlinks can help you increase your domain or page authority as well as increase your visibility and traffic. And more traffic means better rankings!

What Are Your Thoughts?

42 Responses

    1. Probably, but I recommend you earn those links organically. Edu backlinks are hard to get! You need to put your best effort in.

  1. To be honest, link building can be very stressful but it’s worth the effort and patience. I find your guide very useful. Thanks for this Matt.

  2. Your article is wonderfully thoughtful and informative Matthew.Keep them coming!

  3. It is very difficult to find out exactly high-quality backlinks and without backlinks, a website is nothing!

  4. Thank you Matthew for sharing this helpful content with us and I will use it in future so keep sharing more.

  5. I need to ask one thing if we are creating .edu link then should be targeting the home page of our site or post page. which do you prefer and does comment backlink help in any manner?

    1. Hi there, You can target both; however, if you choose to target a particular post/page, you need to make sure this page/post is one of the most important on your website and that it is highly relevant to get a backlink from an Edu website.It is tough to get an Edu backlink from blog commenting. However, blog commenting can help you create relationships with Edu website owners (if your comments are relevant, genuine, and provide value to their audience), which can be really beneficial for you and help you get backlinks later on.I hope this answers your questions. Let me know!

  6. Thanku sir for this information I have used your techniques and get 1 .edu backlink and it feels so good after achieving results. I will definitely follow all the steps you have mentioned and try to Achieve more Backlinks. Thanks a lot

  7. Thanks for sharing your wonderful thoughts and ideas with us. These ideas are really great and useful to all of us.

  8. Hi Matthew, It was a great article! As a marketer, I can understand the importance of link building, and these ways to build Edu backlinks are amazing! I can understand the importance of Edu backlink, and I really appreciate you sharing relevant information about the same. I gained a lot of information and insights from your article, and I am hoping to add them to my strategy to gain some benefits. Thanks for sharing this amazing resource! It was a great help.

  9. You were quite right Mathew, saying building edu links is hard work and time consuming. I follow your advice on a lot of SEO stuff and have managed to so far get 3 EDU backlinks for my website. I continue to work on this but, now I have another problem. What I was no too aware of was bounce rate. I test my pages to the full, clicking here and there to make sure the pages work. Now I have built for myself a very unhealthy 74% bounce rate. Have you done an article on this please? Thanks for all the really helpful articles on your website.

  10. How about student personal pages hosted on .edu server? Many colleges allow you to have a personal website hosted on the schools website usually something like nyu.edu/student/jsantanaWhy not partner with such students

    1. Well, as long as the site is hosted on a .edu server, it is worth partnering with it. No matter if it’s a student’s site or a university’s site.

  11. Can I use edu backlink for my Health & Fitness,Gardening,Relationship,Parenting & Families,Spirituality,Pet Supplies sites?

    1. No. You should only try to build edu backlinks if you write education-related content. Otherwise, it won’t work.

  12. This is interesting a Google has penalised sites these days for having backlinks from .edu domains and doing the old skool scholarship approach.You think .edu are still a good backlink to have?

    1. I do. The thing is.. building backlinks always come with risks. If you’re building links using dodgy techniques, Google can and will penalise you. This is even more true concerning edu backlinks and gov backlinks.So, it all comes down to “how” you build your links.

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