How valuable are .edu links that originate from a foreign country?

• We've noticed that one of our competitors has a lot of .edu links from Chinese schools. It occurred to us that we could easily replicate such links from our partners around the world. So, the question is; how valuable are links coming from foreign educational institutions and non-profit organizations?

Answer:

When all else is equal, links from .edu's aren't any more powerful than non-edu links. But in general they're a solid link to have and can be worth the time to build them.

One strategy we've used is what we call scholarship link building. It's a strategy that's been around forever and is extremely popular with some sites. The idea is to offer a scholarship knowing that universities that are looking to help students fund their education will link to the scholarship page on your site.

Here's an example.

And here is the scholarship recipient winner's announcement page.

If you run that scholarship page thru, say, WebCEO's Backlink Tool, you'll see it has accumulated a lot of very good .edu links from universities. We happen to know this page has generated thousands of clicks for the company over the past several years. However, we can also tell you that this page doesn't do nearly as well now as it did a few years ago.

In regards to foreign .edu links, we suspect the effect would be muted. Foreign links tend to provide less ranking power in comparison to domestic links within the host country. But that doesn't mean they won't have some value. We just don't know how much.

Finally, it's important to note that the BEST link is the link that actually sends you quality traffic. So that should be your main focus. It won't really do you much good to get thousands of links if those links are never clicked.

Here's our resource on