Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing love indexing backlinks from .gov and .edu websites. These 3 major search engines see Government and Education websites as solid authority websites and if you have been following me for a while, you know that I have been on a trip lately promoting .gov and .edu backlinks as the way to go if you want good quality backlinks.
Government and Education websites aren’t that hard to get a backlink on. It’s true, all you need to do is find .gov and .edu websites that have back doors, allowing savvy webmasters like you and me to firstly find them and secondly, add a backlink.
Anyway, I thought I would give you a brief guide on how to find those rare and powerful links for yourself.
The first thing to do is load up Google and we’re going to use certain parameters to sort through Google’s search results to find the sites we want.
The first thing you want to do is to use the site: parameter. This allows us to sort for domain names that end with either .gov or .edu.
Your Google search query will look something like this: site:.edu or site:.gov
Now we want to take this further so that we are going to find everything, because this is going to list every .gov or .edu site indexed by Google depending on what search query we are going to use.
So now we are going to use certain search footprints that you can find on .gov and .edu domains that actually allow you to place links on. Some examples are:
site:.gov inurl:forums – These are Forums (Messageboards) that allow you to create profiles, which we can drop our backlinks on.
site:.gov inurl:wiki – These are Wikipedia style sites, many allow you can create or edit pages.
site:.gov inurl:discussion – Usually will be a forum where you can post to.
In this case I am using .gov but you could just as easy use .edu.
We could take this further and also use footprints on the web sites themselves.
For example:
- vbulletin
- powered by vbulletin
- phpbb
- powered by vbulletin
- invision power board
- wordpress
- etc
Now this is were the real magic begins. We’ll combine all of these footprints to really drill down to find some real Gold. Your final search queries may look something like:
Powered by vbulletin site:.gov or site:.edu inurl:forums
You can even target .gov or .edu web sites in your own niche. Here is an example of a search I did for a niche I was monetizing.
site:.gov inurl:grants*wordpress
As you can see in the above example, I was looking for and .edu website with my keyword grants in its url and the website type is a WordPress Blog.
If you are going to use this search syntax make sure you put a gap between each query and a * when you want to specify a particular Content Management System. I chose WordPress, but it could have been vbulletin or infusion or anything else you want to search for.
The key here is to think of the types of cms platforms that you can post on normally and then add the site:.edu or site:.gov parameter to this search query. The more of these you can think of the more backlink opportunities you will find.
For all my Australian friends, you can add a .au after .gov or .edu. So your sites will look like .gov.au or .edu.au
*LATEST – We now have developed a unique website dedicated solely to finding and then aquiring quality .edu backlinks. You can visit our new website by clicking www.edubacklinks.com.au
Thank you so much for this useful information about getting inbound links from .edu & .gov sites. Never knew the true SEO power until now about them, because never thought or knew anything about it. Please keep ArticlePlayground informed through commenting the Artice Playground blog, when you create another useful post about .gov & .edu websites and or blog posts. Thanks again and hope to get a blog comment from you momentarily
And, please feel free to check out ArticlePlayground anytime at your convenience
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Steve – when you add a link is it to your homepage or is it a deep link, and do you add it as a direct link, or as worded link (a href = student loans)? Thanks!
Kent F.
Thank you for this post. I have been commenting on the .gov sites but I have had a hard time finding the .edu sites. Thanks for the tips!
Kent, the way I do it is to deeplink to a related page. If you want a double listing, deeplink to a related page then from the deeplink add a backlink to another related page on your website. Works everytime for me:)
Steve
A great idea is to help out your local school with a brand new website – in return for a backlink of course!
Tina
I am not getting any backlink.
how can i understand i got backlink.
Is alexi link it?
Well to find out if you have backlinks go to yahoo and use site explore.
Thanks very much for the information. I’ve tried many times to find how to go about getting links from gov/edu sites.
This will be a big help
Irene
dofollow .gov and .edu backlinks are what everybody wants. to find .edu and .gov blogs and forums is easy using those queries Steve recommended, but when it comes to finding dofollow, .edu and .gov blogs and forums, that’a a problem. i don’t think there’s a way to do it other than the hard way… take each blog and check if it’s dofollow.. but i think it worths the effort
Tym
Only recently I found out that backlinks are necessary – and now I’m finding out how very difficult they are to obtain. Thank you very much for the informative article. I especially appreciate your answer to the comment about how to find out if you have backlinks…I have been wondering the same thing. Thanks again.
Candle, Im glad we were able to help you. However some backlinks are worth more than others. Alwas do some research like nofollow, bad sites etc before you submit a backlink.
Cheers
Steve
Thanks for the DIY tips. Some seo companies charge a fortune for doing this but all they do is outsouce their link building to Pakistan or India. Cheers again.
Well I am an seo company also, but I don’t outsource. I do it all myself. Im not cheap, but I get results. But you are right, if you come across a cheap SEO company, chances are they are outsourcing.
Steve
Thanks mate. Awesome article you got here. Have some extra websites to link to which have a bit more information?
Great article..i too believe that .gov and .edu sites will help you get higher rankings as all the search engines feel that your site has good reputation if they have a backlink on these sites..
Good comment Jeff. I dont care what some guru’s say, getting an .gov, .gov.au or an .edu, edu.com.au is seen by Google a very good thing.
I am not getting any backlink.Please explanation more..
I don’t want to sound ‘cocky’ by saying I knew about .gov and .edu site links, but didn’t know how to get them. What you have demonstrated quite brilliantly is the search for such links. In fact how to really use a search engine to discover items in its inner workings. Do you have anymore tips like this on using search engine queries?
Thanks.
Hi Steve
Yes I do have some more info on search strings and will be writing about them later this year. Keep an eye out in your email box for them (if you are a subscriber)
Steve
After reading about how to find .edu and .gov links, I was straight on to it and at the moment I have three links from two blogs and one forum. Thanks. Not sure how they’ll effect my rankings yet. Will let you and your readers know in time. I have signed up to your list and that’s rare for me. I have a practice of writing .pdfs and linking them to my website. One such document ranked higher than my website. I take it this is because it’s pure HTML without breaks, tables etc, another reason I use CSS templates, plus they load quicker. The search spiders seem to love them, (also an extra way to shamesly add more keywords with links that point at different pages of my site). I was wondering what you or any of your readers think to this? By submitting it to pdf search engines and ebook depositories it’s also another way of developing links. (I hope you don’t mind but as the document is about my own search engine knowledge, apart from the .gov, .edu link strategy. I have taken a small copy of your description and placed it into my book, I have though described and linked back your blog here as the ‘original’ text) If you’re unhappy about this let me know and I’ll take the excerpt out.
I never knew about this way of searching .edu and .gov backlinks. I am still a novice & I am sure your article will help me in a great way. By the way, I was just curious to know how to find nofollow or dofollow websites.
Hi Amanda. There are many ways to find .edu websites. I hope you find enough for your website. Keep in mind that you only need around 5 .edu websites to make a difference in your sites SEO.
Steve
Getting .edu and .gov backlinks are considered a great authority links but do you think getting a high no. of these links will improve my PR ?
Google will surely make some modifications in the their algorithm soon as people now know that these are the high authority links and are focusing more on that promoting link farms.
very nice tips.. and very useful now, that a lot of websites closed their comments on old posts, so everyone is looking for high authority blogs to post comments, although Matt Cutts said in an interview that .edu and .gov aren’t that important as people think..
Hi
Thanks for this tips,We all know using this kind of authority codes are good we can get high rank but the problem is its very hard to find this kind of link so I want to say thank you for your tips I really appreciate it just like SayDotCom sites I got lots of ideas too ….
Thank you for the insights … it’s why I love the Internet: have a question – find the answer. I need to develop more backlinks to our site, and obviously .gov or .edu are key. Thank you for your insights.
well, the tips are great.. but the problem is, because of the spam, most of these sites now are nofollow or don’t allow comments anymore..
don’t be so sure zahnarzt, I just found a gem on my first go here in australia
I just followed the great advice above and as we say in australia “bob’s my uncle” (or maybe “strange aunty” 
I think other way of getting back link from those sites is by commenting and participating in their network sites and give your link. Never try to promoter your product just comment on their topic and give your link though it is no follow site many people will visit that and if they like your comment they will come to your site this may helps in driving a bit of traffic.
I have had a click with copy scape here lately, & I couldn’t help but to run your domain name against “copy scape” & I came to learn that you do not have any duplicate content on your site what-so-ever.
I commented back here in January about the usefulness of your article in finding these links. Since then I’ve played around with the search paremeters and for some reason came accross a search engine dedicated to .edu and .gov sites. Anyway the upshot is that it has saved me hours by just going to these search engines and typing in ‘comments’ ‘blogs’ ‘forums’ ‘wordpress’ etc and it comes up with relevant upto date places to leave a link on. Have a link from NASA. Just type ‘search.edu’ or ‘search.gov’ into google to find these search engines then the paremetrs suggested along with your particular interest. Thanks for setting me on this path, I now have over fifty quality backlinks from these sites. And my sites are doing well for it I’m sure.
Oh my goodness! an amazing article dude. Thank you However I’m experiencing subject with ur rss . Don’t know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anyone getting similar rss downside? Anybody who is aware of kindly respond. Thnkx
This is an amazing site, I really need to find some gov and edu sites to get links from and I think this will do the trick. Thanks
Sometimes link exchange with other blogs may helps but in most all cases blogroll is a bad option, it is certainly not the ideal one, simply because two-way links actually decrease the Google juice. You actually need to have one way link coming from respected websites and so the simplest way to do that is to find edu and gov back links.
anyone know of an effective search query for blogs and forums that are related to a specific topic… say, for example, if I want to find .edu or.gov forums and blogs specifically related to weight loss, diabetes, etc.?
It is so important links from these domains, but at the same time is so hard adiquir one, requiring restraint and end all that being excluded
Backlink coming from. Edu domain and. GOV is very important to increase pagerank, but getting this type of domain backlik without investing anything is almost impossible.
Thanks for these tips. These are very helpful in getting backlinks. At the same time, we get meaningful info about gov & edu sites & topics. this is really helpful. Thanks for sharing this blog.
This is good information, they said. Government and education. These were sites that focus, but I’ve been thinking about it because everyone is always saying that it is Google Page Rank is more important. I is definitely going to stop focusing on. Edu y. Gov links. so
thank u so much
Thank you so much for your post. One of the best blogs I’ve seen. Do you mind if I shoot you a quick email about your theme? I put my address in the field if you could give me a minute.
Just a quickie update when it comes to .edu and .edu.au backlinks. I have developed a new search engine that will find .edu and .edu.au websites for you. This really is a biggie, so I have developed a website especially for it and to use the search engine while in Beta will be free. You can try it out for yourself by going to my new website here: http://www.edubacklinks.com.au
Hope ya like it…
Webseo … real name “Steve”