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Why .edu Link Acquisition “Services” Don’t Last Long
October 24, 2008
Recently, I had a client send me an email saying they had been approached by a company who could get them some .edu links in an “under the radar” kind of fashion and they asked me what I thought. Needless to say, I’m not crazy about these types of services. There are lots of reasons why, so I’ll hit on a couple of them now.
Many of these services say they will create original content for you on .edu domains and give your site a couple of links. They also put a couple of links to other resource sites like Wikipedia or a government site that provides a lot of value to the user, but is not a direct competitor of yours. Here are the issues with this:
1. The content is not worthwhile for any human to read. It doesn’t provide any value and just reading it tells you that the person who wrote it doesn’t have very good English skills.
2. Because this is the common trend with these types of services, it’s not hard for a search engine (or link development specialist) to figure out what’s going on.
3. Anything that promotes itself as being “under the radar” isn’t something you should engage in as a white link development specialist or firm. That should be the first warning sign.
4. Links are seldom built to these types of pages and when they are, they aren’t relevant nor are they valuable.
To further elaborate my point, I’ve monitored these types of pages and it doesn’t take long for them to get devalued by the search engines. One page I’ve been watching (no link, and for a reason) went from a PageRank 3 to a gray bar within 2 months of being live. They were also stripped from the indices of the search engines in that time period. I monitor lots of pages like this and while some of them (perhaps 5% of the ones I watch) slip past the requirements and provide PageRank value to the pages that it’s linking to, most of them become worthless pretty quickly. And for the price that you pay (I’ve seen as high as $3,000 a month for some of these pages) that’s a lot of wasted money.
All posts by Angela Moore
posted by Angela Moore at October 24, 2008 07:45 AM
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Comments
Angela,
This is a great post. Very Insightful!
Saheed
Posted by: Saheed Ahmed at November 3, 2008 03:52 AM
Hi Angela,
I had noticed some sites selling .edu links in this way - and had actually been tempted. Thanks for the heads up.
Posted by: Paul Anthony at November 4, 2008 04:05 AM
I usually try to recieve links from .edu resources. It is ery hard. But .edu domains (anyone) are very trusted in Google.
Posted by: NoMoreSEO at November 5, 2008 02:52 PM
You are right, nobody is reading those pages. However, if you look through a good Web Grader, you'll notice that those links bring you the most weight in Google's eyes, and your site will faster appear on the top of others for a popular keyword search.
So, in terms of Link Building techniques, it does make a lot of sense to have .EDU links.
In terms of really having people reading those pages - probably not. So, if you see 2 services, one is selling just a text link, another is offering you a content on the page, plus a link, but more expensive - choose the first one. Make sure you have only one link pointed to your site in there. If you have more, the value of one will be splitted between them.
Posted by: Sasha Grebenyuk at December 22, 2008 04:18 PM
These pages are very effective, so long as they're hosted on a trusted domain, and receive some links from that trusted domain (ie the page isn't orphaned). You should also build links to your edu page.
Posted by: Webwatcher at March 17, 2009 07:18 AM