Bowman Is anyone running a scholarship page program to gain .edu links from universities? Would be interested to know your results. Considering dropping ours after reading Jim Boykin's comments. 4 👍🏽422 💬🗨📰👈
Romano It no longer works. It worked several years ago, but I haven't seen that it's effective anymore.
Bowman ✍️ » Romano I've mostly been scared to stop doing it just in case I lose 30-40 links all at the same time, many of which are 80+ Domain Authority (DA). Such a pain though to renew it every year. Romano » Bowman I stopped caring about domain authority a long time ago. The only thing I care about today is organic traffic, because I think that's what Google is now focused on. Bowman ✍️ » Romano I'm in the marine industry where several major websites all fight for the same terms. Even if you win on content, traffic to your core page, and on page optimization, the higher authority site usually wins out. Even with garbage content and low Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores Jonathan » Bowman I am also in the marine industry. I stopped doing the scholarship campaigns and most of the links dropped off fairly quickly when I didn't renew. I didn't notice any drop in traffic or rankings. Have you tried running a skyscraper campaign? Gilmore » Jonathan What is a skyscraper campaign? Bowman ✍️ » Gilmore https://ahrefs.com/blog/skyscraper-technique/ How to Execute the Skyscraper Technique (and Get Results) Bowman ✍️ » Jonathan I haven't had much luck. Most of what I've found is either other dealer/broker sites, luxury sites that won't play ball, newspaper websites etc. I'm in the yachting side with a focus on 40' – 150' yachts.
Amit Getting EDU links is definitely possible and we've been successful in getting them for a few clients… but nothing to do with scholarships. Look into creating a resource which staff or students might find useful, and then approaching them with that. With the right value exchange you'd be surprised by the kind of links you can get. We've managed to get resource page links on the likes of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and USC. Denis I wouldn't work on scholarship campaign. Instead, analyse content which EDU websites may be interested in, then create / buy and outreach. This should have a massive impact as just few people are doing this 💟1
Truslow 🎓 Most of the "results" things have been covered here pretty well. It doesn't really work. I wanted to jump in for a second and add a bit on the "why" and a few other things not covered completely. WHY it doesn't really work anymore is that the biggest power of links is tied into context. Basically for every niche, Google has a set of seed sites. The big value of a link comes in no small part from the "distance from one of those seeds." So… for example, a seed site (from your niche) links to another site and then that site links to your site – that's a distance of two links and will have some really nice value. If it's the seed->site->another site->another site->another site->another site->your site… That's six links away from seed. Still pretty valuable, but not nearly so much as the 2 hops link. Now… it's unlikely that a college is one of the seed sites for your niche. And, unless they either absolutely specialize in your niche for their training or they are one of the very top schools for that niche – it's not likely that they are very closely linked to any of the seed sites for your niche. In most cases, so long as your site is already fairly well established, your own site is probably already vastly closer to one of your relevant seed sites than the university site. As such, that link from the University might help your scholarship page rank (and other scholarship and education/training related pages, possibly). But its value is pretty much going to stop there. It's not really going to help much in terms of getting your money terms to rank. NOTE: This is a VERY simplified version of how this works. There is a lot more that goes into calculating link value – much of it unrelated to these concepts and even in the way that this concept actually works. It would take many many pages of information to explain it all completely – and even then, no one can know exactly how Google has cobbled this all together since the information on how this all could work comes from several different patents. The patents don't often talk about how what they are describing might interact with things described in other patents unless the core of the patent relies on those technologies to execute. Another thing here – this is (in part) why most of the top notch SEO users put very little value in Domain Authority (DA) and other metrics like that. We always say, "Google doesn't use that metric," but it's actually a lot more than that. None of these tools take any of this link distance stuff into account. (They can't really – because no one knows what the seed sites are. I'm fairly certain no one at Google knows either – they most likely are not added by human hand, at least most of the time, but rather chosen by the algorithm itself. It might even be the case that someone with top level security at Google couldn't even hit the database and look up this information. I'm not sure.) Domain Authority (DA) and similar scores work more like the original Press Release (PR). A link is a link is a link – and it's value that it can pass along is calculated by how many links are going to the linking page (along with the calculated value each of those linking pages has). This means that if there is ANY value to these numbers, it's really only in comparing the values you have vs. other sites directly in your niche. And even that assumes that all those sites are putting the same energies into link building (i.e. getting the same ratio of "close to seed" vs. "far from seed") links as you are.
Shehwar » Truslow Wow! Wonderful Answer. I read a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but I have never heard about link Hop and seed sites before, Thanks for giving me a new perspective to think. I was also auditing some Programming sites a few days ago and the major finding was that the ranked sites were linked to their respective categories sites. i.e Github and Stackoverflow. Thanks again. Truslow 🎓 » Shehwar I imagine most of them are probably marking up their Code, Output, Vars, and Keys properly, too. This isn't anything I've specifically heard Google talk about, but they do talk about "structured data" – and markup like this does give the information structure, context, and purpose. (I'm talking about onsite code examples… the stuff on GIT and Stackoverflow is generally marked up properly by default.) https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_computercode_elements.asp HTML Computer Code Elements Andrew 🎓 » Truslow Exactly Koszo » Truslow Andrew I agree, but I've gotten good results from them in the past few years. I don't know if I'd start a new campaign now, but for the right client I'd still do it. Especially if client was in an educational niche or Artificial Intelligence (AI) or robotics or something that can be tied to universities. Also only go for the best schools with sponsorships and prestigious awards. If there's a $500 vape company scholarship link on the page you want, you probably don't want it lol Andrew 🎓 » Koszo Yeah quality is definitely a factor. Good point. And you can get very contextual scholarship links depending on the client. Truslow 🎓 Every link has "some" value to it. Even off topic stuff can do some impressive things – but not the SAME things as stuff that's in your direct line toward the top of your chain. And there's user and branding value to a site offering scholarships – so sure. Do it. I would too. I have a site that does internships with a local trade school and they often share tales of people coming out of that school who do their internship with my client and then either get hired on permanently or move on to some other company and achieve success. I'm certain that's helping a lot of things in a lot of places – but definitely not in the way it might have a few years back. But for the potential customer – it speaks to the skill and training of their employees and for the school it speaks to their training including real world work experience so everyone wins – SEO be damned.
