Scholarship and grant link building is a tactic that stems from an old myth that .edu and .gov backlinks are more valuable than others. This idea formed because an earned link from these sites is harder to get as you have to be an accredited school or government agency to buy these TLDs (top level domains). Because only a limited group of people can buy them, the websites must have some form of quality control.
Scholarship Link Building Is A Bad Idea, Be Careful.
On top of the quality control, these organizations tend to have fact checking, publish research papers using data only they have access to, and they get sourced by other authoritative websites. The sourcing, fact checking, content created by licensed practitioners helps them achieve higher scores in SEO tools like domain authority. Not to mention if they have sports teams they get media mentions and backlinks regularly.
Scholarship Link Building Is A Bad Idea, Be Careful.
Important reminder: Domain Authority, AS, toxicity scores, etc… are metrics third party tools make up. Search engines do not use these.
Scholarship Link Building Is A Bad Idea, Be Careful.
It’s easy to see why they would be the targets of link builders. But don’t count .edu and .gov links out. Most get ignored, but if there is a research paper and your data is a sourced from the paper, they’re giving you credibility and sending relevant traffic to your content based on merit. If your data is directly related to your products or services, in theory this link should likely count as a vote for your site.
Scholarship Link Building Is A Bad Idea, Be Careful.
Make sure to provide resources for coursework that are unique, studies that are thought provoking, and content that is helpful (provides a unique solution) to “earn” quality links. And make sure same author or professor does not have an unnatural outbound linking pattern. If they link out to multiple sites and those sites are not contextually relevant, you’re part of an unnatural link scheme and these…
Scholarship Link Building Is A Bad Idea, Be Careful.
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