5 Smart Technigues to get .Edu and .Gov Backlinks For Your Blogs

Most people don't know how beneficial .GOV and .EDU backlinks can be, or whether they're useful at all for a website. It is easy to confuse their importance with that of other TLDs (Top Level Domains) such as .COM, .NET etc, and you'd figure that since .COMs are the most popular and the most expensive, ergo they're the most important. We'll, you'd be wrong to think that. A website's trust rating is far more important that what it cost to set it up. And as you can imagine, .GOV and .EDU top level domains enjoy a special level of trust which is regarded very highly by search providers such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. And backlinks from such domains can take your website's rank to another level. Here are some best techniques to get .GOV and .EDU backlinks for your site.

1. Comments

One of the many ways you can build backlinks is by commenting on other blogs. There's nothing quite like it when you get the conversation going. To start off creating a .gov and .edu backlink profile or your blog, start finding such blogs to comment on. A great website that'll help you do that is Drop My Link. You can search for blogs based on the desired keyword. But more importantly, you can select the type of blogs you want to see from the drop-down list. From there, you can choose .edu or .gov blogs, and get the relevant blogs based on your keyword!

You can then filter out your results. Go for blogs with a high PR first, because commenting takes time, and you don't want to waste time on low ranking blogs.

2. Recognize .edu bloggers

Aside from comments, getting a proper dofollow backlink from .edu and .gov blogs can be very difficult. One strategy is to feature some such bloggers in a post of yours, so that they'll link back to you in return out of gratification. For example, you could create a list of 'the best university bloggers', or 'the best students blogs in the U.S' etc. Small recognition awards like these are sure to get attention, and hopefully a backlink.
To find such blogs, here's a Google Search trick. If you search Google for <site:.edu> (without the angled brackets), you will run a search for all domains with a .edu extension. You can also search a specific site using this method <site:yoursite.com>. If you search Google for <inurl:blog> (again, without the brackets), you will land all webpages with the term "blog" in their url. You can combine the two to run a search for .edu blogs - <site:.edu inurl:blog>. Moreover, you can add individual search terms within quotes to refine your results according to keywords <site:.edu inurl:blog "technology news">. This way, you can feature 'top university technology blogs'

3. Find resource pages

If your website provides useful information on a particular subject, then you may use that to get inside a university's resource page. Resource pages are there for linking out to other sites where students can find useful information regarding a particular subject. So if you are a computer guru and know your way around Linux development for example, you could contact computing institutes' web team to put out a backlink to you.
You can use the same search trick you used earlier to find resource pages. For example, run a search for <site:.edu inurl:resources "technology"> or <site:.edu inurl:links "Linux"> (without brackets), and you'll find out plenty of universities you could contact.

4. Do some volunteer work

I mean not like charity work. But you can help some university web team design or improve a component on their website in return for a backlink. Now this, of course, requires you to have some web development skills, but you can hire a freelancer to do the job for you too.
All you have to do is, find a university or college site, and look through it if it looks poorly made. Not every university has a full time web design team. Often times, they only intend to give out valuable information, without caring much about how their webpages look. For example, I was recently reading about some research proceedings about a new type of lens technology in cameras at a university, and I couldn't help but notice the colourless, bland design. Now the webpage itself had a very high traffic and the university was very reputable. But in all fairness, researchers working behind the new camera technology most probably wouldn't know about web design, which makes it the perfect opportunity for people to contact them, and offer to redo their design in return for a backlinl. Such researchers wouldn't even care about the backlink, as long as they're getting a better design.

5. Hire college students

Now I know this one is unconventional, but hey, so long as it works! In some colleges and universities, students have access to .edu domains, where they are allowed sub-domains of their own. You can set someone up to create a student blog for their college, and then link back to your own website.
There are many ways you could hire a student to do your bidding. You can use the Reddit ForHire section to post your gig. You can also post a classified on Craigslsit. Or, you could always go to one of the many freelancing websites available, where you can post a job.
So, did you like these tips, or would like to add something to them? Feel free to jump on into the comments section below. Cheers :)