South West eCommerce

Links from .edu and .gov websites are generally more beneficial than links from other sites (of the same PR). But how on earth do you get them?

Yes, getting .edu or .gov backlinks is hard. Very hard. Believe us, we've tried.

The main way people find them is to go to Google and search for site:edu inurl: "post a comment" or something similar, to find .edu websites that invite people to make comments on an article or in a forum. The problem is, for most of those sites you need to be a student at the organisation, with an account, to make a post. And for those that are open to the public to post, you'll find that the comments are already full of links to Viagra, Cialis, and all kinds of sites, as everyone has already spammed the page with their link.

Then there are services out there that you can pay for .edu links. These services can be placed into two categories. The first are the cheaper ones that will place your links on the crappy spam filled pages noted in the paragraph above. Why bother? The second ones are much better, and offer to place an article or something on a .edu site, with your links embedded in the article. These kinds of links are much more beneficial to you, as the article or page will normally only include your links, and you can social bookmark and promote that article, which in turn increases the link juice you get from that article. However, these kinds of links are expensive, and you can expect to pay several hundred dollars per link. If you can afford them though, they are usually worth it, depending on the circumstances.

And if you thought it was hard to get .edu links, then getting .gov links is even harder.

So what to do? Well, to be honest, we haven't worked it out yet. One solution might be to try and find a student who has a personal webspace or profile on a .edu network (eg. a web design student or something), and see if there is any "arrangement" you can make to place advertisements on their page. Be careful though, this may be against the terms and conditions of their webspace usage, and you don't want to get them banned. That being said, if you are a student who has access to a .edu page, we would be very interested in talking to you. Please send us an email!.

We'll update this article as we discover any more options, or feel free to post your ideas below in our comments section.