Relevancy of backlinks for scholarship resource

[BobGW]

Hello,

We want to build a niche scholarship tool for our Ecommerce site. It will sort through relevant scholarships for a certain demographic, say, Hispanic engineering students for example.

My question is:

If the tool's focus is Hispanic engineering scholarships, and we sell supplies that are in the same general category as products that engineers use, will the backlinks we gain from people linking to our tool be relevant.

The main reason I ask is that I think most backlinks will be from Hispanic sites, and I don't know if there will be enough relevance to make the links help.

What are your thoughts on this?

[rayvensoft]

Hi BobGW,
   I actually have experience in doing exactly this for one of my sites.  I created a free academic archive - in the same niche as my site - as link bait.  My results were mixed.

I got quite a few new links coming back to the resource, and still do.  The problem has been so far that the links are generally from low DA pages like blogs.  There are exceptions as I did get a .mil and a few .edu links from it as well.  Now, the traffic to the site definitely went up due to the new section as did social engagement.  So, just for this it may be said that it was worth it.

But despite all of this, I have not seen any major changes in SERP (up or down) in the last 6 months since this section was released.  It just seems like the "link juice" is not transferring in any meaningful way despite a pretty simply site structure.  I have also not seen any marked increase in conversions on the site.  So, while Google does not seem to be punishing the site for this section, it also does not seem to be giving it credit for this either (even though it ranks well for its own keyword).

In the end, it is as Andrew said, it depends on how much   time and money this section will cost you.  Based on the current success of this section on my site I would still say the 2 months to create it were worth it.  I just hope that the SERP benefits will propagate to the rest of the site in the long term

Good luck.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

Morning, BobGW,

It depends on the purpose of your question:

• If your question is: will these links help? Yes, they'll help if the links aren't spammy. They may even help you tap into new audiences, keywords, and referrals.
• If your question is: are these links worth your time/money? That depends on your parameters. If it's cheap for you to experiment, experiment. If it's NOT cheap for you to experiment, then it depends on your risk tolerance level. I'd recommend you go for it; you should try to explore the possibility of what those keywords do for your site.

Hope that answers your question!

--Andrew