As most of us already know, linkage data determines where you sit on Google’s food chain.  But what if I told you that you don’t have to have thousands of links to have a high ranking site?  In fact, it merely takes a few high quality links to have the same results as having thousands of links from lower quality sites.

The links that you should be targeting are high pagerank links, or .edu links.  Links from .edu sites are generally very trusted, and they hold a lot of value in Google’s algorithm.  These links come from colleges, universities, and research institutes across the globe, and can be just what you need to start building a high profile link portfolio.  But how do you get them?

The easiest way is to buy them.  Digitalpoint often has .edu links for sale in it’s forums.  They aren’t cheap, but being as valuable as they are, you wouldn’t expect them to be either.  Check out the forums at Digitalpoint and see if you can’t find a few.

The second method involves friends and family.  Some schools, offer free web pages, or even a social network for their students.  If you are enrolled, or have friends or family that are enrolled… ask them about this.  It’ll be free, and it gets you a few high quality .edu backlinks.

You can also try writing a high quality paper for a university, and see if they can use it as part of their course.  When they do this, it’s generally pretty easy to bargain a link or two out of them.  However, this is extremely time consuming.

Or, my favorite way to get .edu backlinks is by using our favorite search tool… Google.  You can type in this search string to pull up .edu sites that allow you to comment.

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

site:.edu [finds edu domains]
inurl:blog [ find blogs]
“post a comment” [makes sure we can post to this blogs]
-”comments closed” [does not show these closed blogs]
-”you must be logged in” [does not show blogs where u need to log in]

Give it a try… see if you can find some great .edu backlinks!

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