.edu campaign

[jameswalkerson]

I have an idea for a very scale-able way to acquire .edu links with actual page authority (ie. not forum spam or student profiles ect...). I will be hiring someone to do in house outreach so the links will be obtained by people talking to people.

My question is would Google see this as spam if my link building campaign mainly targets a large number or .edu's and all of a sudden I am receiving a high number of one type of backlink? What worries me is that while I have other types of links, this campaign would dilute a high percentage of my link profile with .edu links  from unique domains. I hear that diversity is key but its hard to ignore the high value .edu targets especially when the linking pages are higher in authority than my own.

Also the pages that these .edu links are coming from would not necessarily be relevant to my website however the content I am hosting to obtain the links is relevant to the pages the links are coming from. Does this make a difference.

Sorry I am being vague. I do not want to give away the strategy. Thank you for any assistance.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Why do schools And students alike want your referral traffic?

" While the math example was exactly that, an example, yes the links are highly valuable to the students. I know they provide value to the students because the links are bringing in referral traffic (these links actually take up 3 of the top 5 sources of referral traffic). "

Explain to me how that helps the student? They're not in search engine optimization the kids going to school you're talking about something that benefits yourself sir

With 200 EDU links you will be manually audited and I guarantee most likely penalized unfortunately. Not saying this because I want to be that way soon because Google wants it to be that way it's so clear that if you at all try to abuse any of these things such as a high-profile EDU not only will you most likely be banned from Google you will be made to case study. You came to this form for advice. And you seem to be taking the advice that while I'm not saying anything negative about goes with what you want it to do with what you want to hear and that's not really beneficial to you so I'm going to tell you exactly what I know from researching .edu use and what is going to most likely happen considering that your Telling us your site is not relevant to what you will be publishing. Thus it is a business to make money off of kids who are in school is it not?

I personally am not putting on trial I'm not trying to make it sound as bad as I might've made it sound but I don't care I'm just trying to prevent you from getting a whole Lotta trouble

Just an update. Please Google link schemes or may I add links to benefit myself in any way using dot EDU & .Gov I believe you'll find a long list of people that felt similarly to the way you felt unfortunately Google does not like people benefiting off of other people like schools government institutions.

Ask yourself this question

Will you be creating content that will not be required to be linked to for any such reason whatsoever in order to access it?

Does your content benefit you in any way shape way or form?

Why do you believe that you should have the right to benefit from this content and cools private search index where they a private corporation get to choose who benefits and who doesn't mean at the end of the day why would it be best for them to go to you instead of you releasing it directly to the school?

Lastly if you are going to be releasing content and it would benefit people in school today. You should be working hand-in-hand with the school itself and releasing the content with the administers approvals not talking to us about how you can get link juice from the dot EDU which by the way will not give you anymore Link juice then a.com.org.net domain but for the fact that.EDU use DOT com guys are regarded so highly they're given a lot of authority meaning they make wise decisions into who and why they link to somebody to if you were to make links from authorities as highs the Edus  you do use you would get the same thing so if this content is that valuable ask you again and unless it is as relevant you don't Benefit at all from thinking from it.

Another thing that alarms me you seem to think that because.ED use might not lose their link power or link juice. Over time and I might be inclined to agree with you on that however Google doesn't care about that they care about your site they can take away the links pointing to your site that are dot EDU's and give you know power from them I want you to understand that take Your site and eliminate it from Google if they want to do that doesn't hurt the dot EDU links but it will hurt your business because it will not exist on the web.

I just want this to be clear. And I think you know as well as everyone else that from what you've said that you're worried about putting this out there if it was 100% legitimate you would not be worried about it and you would post it so I think you've answered your own questions again sir and I urge you to either ask with your last private question to SEOmoz for advice That would be the wisest thing to do. This is the last month and you have into the 15th ask for free do it and you will know the answer. My honest belief is you will not do very well creating a company that is creating content for schools so that you can get link juice from the content you make targeted to get benefit off of edus

[AlanBleiweiss]

if all conditions are right for "trusted" (content, sources of links, etc.) there should be no reason these become a problem.

Press releases have their absolutely valid place in the mix and if done properly, are good for the mix.  Read my article on the myths and realities of their use in regard to SEO.

Outreach is also a perfectly valid marketing process even in regard to SEO.  What matters is how you go about it, what you ask for and that no compensation be offered in an "exchange".

[Chris.Menke]

I'm saying you may call them stupid if they got you in trouble down the road.

Anyway, penalties aside, there's no guarantee that this will help your site rank better for the keywords you would want your site to rank better for--and in the end, that's what all this is about, right. The content you are "hosting to obtain the links" may rank well for terms related to it and other pages may even get a PR boost from it but that's not going to necessarily translate into rankings on your other pages for their keywords.

[jameswalkerson]

Stupid links???? maybe it doesn't help that I am not willing to reveal the strategy but the links I am getting are high quality, human edited, editorial, and legitimate. I highly doubt unless Google decides to devalue educational institutions that these links will ever lose value.

Let me rephrase my situation. Lets say I do something news worthy and every single news site in the nation decides they want to write a story about me and link to my website. Can a large amount of news column (lets say in content and contextual) links either lose effectiveness after a while because of lack of diversity or have a negative effect because it is all one type of link even though they are all from individual reputable sources.

[Chris.Menke]

Even if the links are "natural" (in all the many meanings of that word) if it's over-done--and it sounds like that's your plan-- you'll risk losing what ever benefit they're providing your site at some future algorithm update. If that were to happen, you might look at yourself in the mirror at that time and wonder why, as a smart business person, you bothered to spend the money to hire someone to get all those stupid links for you. That is, of course, if the site you're doing this for is a legitimate business site with long-term goals.  If it's a spamin' & jamin' type of site and all about the short-term, then what the heck--go for it.  Just wondering--have you ever experienced waking up in the morning to find 90% of your organic traffic has disappeared?

If it's a legit business site, a wiser option may be to settle for getting just of few of the best links possible with this plan of yours and then move on to some other plan.  Alternatively, you could create a site that was directly relevant to the types of links this plot will acquire and you'd possibly have a lot less to worry about upon waking up each morning.

[jameswalkerson]

Thank you Alan this is the type of response I was looking for. While the math example was exactly that, an example, yes the links are highly valuable to the students. I know they provide value to the students because the links are bringing in referral traffic (these links actually take up 3 of the top 5 sources of referral traffic).

Also I am not paying for these links and I have no control over the anchor text although I am getting a lot of branded :).

The thing I don't understand though is this content would never be found or build links naturally unless I put the content in front of the right people. I don't understand how me marketing and promoting the content would have any negative affect. Don't SEO's even have the term outreach?

I have been thinking about a press release for the project but I have read some negative things about them and am quite reluctant.

All the guidelines for quality you posted above check out for this campaign. Will it be ok if I am getting about 50-100 .edu links pointing to this piece of content?

[AlanBleiweiss]

There is no one simple answer.

Is the specific information you are providing truly highly valuable for students at the schools where these links would be acquired from?

Are you paying for these links or offering compensation of some sort?

These are the kind of questions needing to be answered to expand on the concept GKLA referred to about someone looking over your shoulder - it's about trust and valid reasoning for the links.

If the answers to those are yes, this is valid, and if the link placement is done in a way that allows the individual edu page editors the freedom to uniquely describe what they're going to be linking to, and you leave it to them to decide what anchor text they will use (with no manipulation from you), that is the scenario where you are most likely going to be okay with the links.

This is true even if there are a high volume of links all of a sudden from .edu sites. Because in this scenario, this is the only way such links would ever come about if you took SEO out of the equation.  Anything else would smell like an unnatural process designed to manipulate rankings in an artificially forced way.

I would also suggest you do support work around this.  If the content is that good, and you believe worthy of people on edu sites writing about it and in turn linking to it, then you should promote the great information you've created not just within .edu staff circles.

Blog about it. Tweet about it. Post info about it to LinkedIn and Facebook and Google+.  Consider a press release announcing it. See if you can get journalists in the educational arena or the math world to review it and ask them if they like it or like what you're offering, if they would be willing to write about it on their sites.

If you do those things, that will reinforce the true concept of "create content people want to link to" without crossing into "just for the SEO".

[jameswalkerson]

Yes I would do my campaign because I'm getting high quality editorial links my concern is to many of the same types of links from the same type of domains.

[GKLA]

If a member of a search engine web spam team were sitting over your shoulder, would you still embark on your campaign?

Since you are specifically targeting .edu domains, to gain higher rankings - that in itself seems like manipulation on some level.  That's just my opinion.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think you answered your own question.

"

"Also the pages that these .edu links are coming from would not necessarily be relevant to my website however the content I am hosting to obtain the links is relevant to the pages the links are coming from. Does this make a difference."

Yes it makes a huge difference if you are getting links from places that are not relevant to you. You are essentially gathering links for no reason but to up ranking and Google will see that especially with .edu

I believe Amazon recently had to deal with Google when they offered kits discounts if they signed up or gave testimonies and gave testimonials using .edu links

I could be wrong on the name of the company might not Amazon on but I know someone tried to do it. They were penalized, and they stopped doing it you should in my opinion not start doing it's fine to get a couple , of .edu's to use but if your plan is to use  a high percentage of thought .edu's and you're not at all related to the subject matter they are linking from Google will come down on you hard.

I wouldn't even begin to do it. It's a scam right? Don't try to manipulate Google it's not worth it really isn't just spend your effort trying to build quality content that people will enjoy and engage them when they do when you do build it.