Why it is important to get edu or gov backlinks?
As any SEO would let you know, backlinks to your site should be from a trustworthy source else you might do more harm then good to your search rankings. So what does that tell you about edu and gov domains ? edu and gov domains are quite exclusive. They are only given to educational institutions and therefore can provide very valuable backlinks if they contain content related to your site. Therefore it is quite essential, from SEO perspective, to get edu backlinks and gov backlinks.
That might make you think that to get edu backlinks might be quite difficult task. You might be partly right but it is not rocket science after all. You can get edu backlinks with the help of some good old fashioned Google search. Remember that the educational institutions have students and each student gets his or her own page or blog under the edu domain. Many of these students are avid bloggers and want to see your responses to their articles. So all we need to do is try to fish these blogs out and provide some relevant comments such that our links are accepted. This should be the easiest way to get edu backlinks.
Google commands to get edu or gov backlinks
Get edu or gov backlinks by directly searching for blogs
Lets first look at the Google command that we need to use for searching the edu blogs which would be used to get edu backlinks for our site. I have listed the command below, more details on commands can be found here. All you need to do it replace the “KEYWORD” with your own keyword that describes your site and type it in Google search bar.
site:.edu inurl:blog “comment” -”you must be logged in” -”posting closed” -”comment closed” “KEYWORD”
Use of site command to get edu or gov backlinks
This command asks Google to look for blogs containing edu domain. You can also replace this with .gov which is also very valuable domain (not everyone can buy these domains either).
Use of inurl command to get edu or gov backlinks
This Google command specifies a keyword “blog” to be part of url.
Rest of the commands used to get edu or gov backlinks
Then we are simply looking for text “comment” and “KEYWORD” in the searched blogs and asking Google not to return a result ( by using negative or dash sign in front of the string) where page contains “you must be logged in”, “posting closed” or “comment closed”.
That is pretty much it. Just replace they “KEYWORD” with what is relevant for your blog such as “travel”, “food” etc and test it out.
Get edu or gov backlinks by searching for competitor blogs
This mechanism to get edu backlinks might be easiest and smartest of all. Here we use the following command to find edu sites most relevant to your content to get edu backlinks.
linkdomain:http://www.competitor-website.com/ +site:.edu
Use of Linkdomain command to get edu or gov backlinks
Here the Google command linkdomain specifies that you are looking for backlinks for the domain mentioned. Make sure that you search without www also as that’s a separate subdomain. The next part asks the search to be limited to sites with edu domains only.
This will get edu backlinks but again you can get gov backlinks by same strategy. Just replace edu with gov.
One important SEO consideration is that once you get edu backlinks do try and get backlinks from other relevant domains also. The more diverse you are the better it will be for your site or blog authority.
