Unlimited free .edu and .gov links

November 16, 2007 by Collin LaHay
Filed under: Link Building 

This is the third post in The Link Building Cookbook series, showing you how and where to find the best places to add links to your websites to increase website traffic.

In every webmaster forum and blog out there, the community always goes nuts over finding ways to get universities and government sites to link to you. This post is dedicated to helping those people save their money and allow them to get an unlimited amount of .edu and .gov links for free, all through the power of google!

The ’site:’ feature in Google allows only results with that domain name or domain extension to show up. You can “hack” this feature to allow Google to find the most relevant university and government websites related to your sites.

Examples:
Google query: site:.gov blog [or site:.edu blog]
Results in: Google finds any .gov website that is running a blog or has a /blog/ directory. You can then visit these blogs and post comments (if you can find wordpress blogs like this one), and get hundreds of free .gov backlinks.
[Alternative queries: 'blog' 'blogs' 'wordpress' 'comment' 'guestbook' '2007' '2006']

Google query: site:.edu *your niche* + blog
For example: site:.edu internet marketing blog
The top result is a .edu blog that links to a non edu blog, but that blog is related and is PR3 and has edu backlinks. That is also a great relevant place to comment, even if it is not directly a .edu. On the other hand, the third result was a PR3 highly related .edu internet marketing blog with zero comments. That is easy .edu backlinks!

You can easily replicate these queries to fit your needs, and it is highly scalable. You can find .edu, .gov, and if you are lucky, .mil blogs. If you are not as picky, you can just search specifically for the blogs without the .edu or .gov extension, and you can find some high pageranked blogs on the first pages of results. Play around with it, enjoy it, it’s free!

Comments

41 Comments on Unlimited free .edu and .gov links

  1. Sudarshan on Fri, 16th Nov 2007 4:19 pm
  2. Very good Ideas….my idea is a bit evil,Get a friend who has an edu website….and ask him to link you ;)

  3. sudhir on Tue, 20th Nov 2007 2:14 am
  4. I already knew this trick. :-)

  5. aislandas on Tue, 20th Nov 2007 12:18 pm
  6. I would digg every single post of you if there would be a chance to do that :) Thanks.

  7. Nick on Wed, 21st Nov 2007 4:51 am
  8. Aren’t blog comments NOFOLLOW ?

  9. Matt on Wed, 21st Nov 2007 1:05 pm
  10. I have bookmarked so many of your pages now, great blog.

  11. perfumer on Thu, 22nd Nov 2007 1:59 am
  12. It is one of the best blogs on link building

  13. Kelly - FreeStuffed on Tue, 18th Dec 2007 10:25 pm
  14. This is a good idea as long as your comments are relevant to the blogs you are commenting on.

  15. Jansie Blom on Thu, 3rd Jan 2008 12:34 pm
  16. I’m currently doing this, but it seems most of the blogs are nofollowed. this does not help, does it?

  17. Collin LaHay on Thu, 3rd Jan 2008 9:05 pm
  18. Nofollow will not help you in Google, no. It will still give traffic + benefit you in the other main search engines.

  19. LiverpoolMad on Mon, 21st Jan 2008 5:15 am
  20. Fantastic idea …. i have been helped by your new style of SEO .. Thanks for helping

  21. GPearce on Mon, 21st Jan 2008 5:12 pm
  22. Ever thought of using blogsearch, by Google? http://blogsearch.google.com ;)

    -George

  23. Samual on Mon, 21st Jan 2008 11:33 pm
  24. Thank for the info I will use this.

  25. Nathan on Tue, 22nd Jan 2008 1:52 pm
  26. I know of a blog search engine out there that shows only blogs without the nofollow tag. I will post it when I find out the URL.

  27. Sarah on Sun, 27th Jan 2008 8:20 am
  28. Great post. This is going to help me out a lot. Thanks for all your help!

  29. Affiliate Confession on Thu, 31st Jan 2008 8:24 am
  30. Thanks for the tips here. I just paid $7 for a little ebook a few weeks ago that taught me the same info. I wish I would have found this first. I could have bought 2 cafe mochas at B&N if I had.

  31. Beef Jerky on Fri, 1st Feb 2008 4:12 pm
  32. I may have been a little late to this party because all of the blogs that i came across want you to register or seem to have errors. Maybe my niche is a little small… hmmmm… will try again later… Great blog site, glad i found this…

  33. Kien on Tue, 19th Feb 2008 9:43 pm
  34. Nice finding! I’m gonna try it for sure

  35. Breakaway on Wed, 20th Feb 2008 1:31 am
  36. This needs to be niche specific… the only blogs I could find about travel were about someone’s vacation, and they were all no follow.

    Awesome idea for those in a niche with some good .edu and .gov blogs out there!

  37. femi on Thu, 21st Feb 2008 11:30 am
  38. i have had a hard time trying to get .edu, .gov on the search engine. I am glad that you gave this tip on finding these sites. Good job

  39. Design on Tue, 27th May 2008 3:02 pm
  40. Already starting to search for edu and .gov blogs to comment. Thanks, this was really helpful!

  41. make money blog on Tue, 3rd Jun 2008 9:16 pm
  42. As someone pointed out, most blog comments are NOFOLLOW.

  43. stive on Wed, 4th Jun 2008 12:20 am
  44. I have bookmarked your page thanks a lot

  45. adda4u on Wed, 4th Jun 2008 9:48 am
  46. This will really helps me ..

    2 days back when i check backlinks of my site it shows tht i dont have any linking from Edu and Gov sites

    I am trying to find out find Result zero …

    Now i am happy…I love the article …Which helps me to get more links thanks a lot

  47. Edward on Sat, 7th Jun 2008 1:33 pm
  48. You can also search for:

    site:edu cool links
    or things like that – and find link pages from edu sites. I discussed this also in my article aboutbuilding edu links

  49. busby seo challenge on Sun, 8th Jun 2008 9:31 am
  50. Great tips, great articles. im very thanks..

  51. Cole on Wed, 18th Jun 2008 7:07 am
  52. Just found some interesting blogs with your keywords. Thanks :-)

  53. lindsay hogan on Sat, 16th Aug 2008 3:26 am
  54. Thanks but still I am not satisfy with this google query search because when I search for .edu and .gov blogs then most of them are redirected and not accepting any external links.

  55. Dieta Personalizzata on Mon, 1st Sep 2008 2:41 pm
  56. thanks for your post.

    It’s a pity most of the .edu and .gov blogs have no follow tags.

    I have some posts on some .edu blogs and though they have nofollow tags, google recognises them as links in my webmaster tools.

    Strange…

    Roby

  57. small hosting on Sat, 1st Nov 2008 3:08 am
  58. I thought .edu and .gov links has the same effect like .com. Anybody can correct me?

  59. XpertAdvice on Thu, 4th Dec 2008 12:14 am
  60. I would add something up.

    The below query will directly give you the list of only those .edu blogs which allow comments, This way you will directly get the list of those blogs which accepts comment.

    site:.edu inurl:blog

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  63. Sanjay on Tue, 30th Dec 2008 12:28 am
  64. Most of the blogs are nofollow that doesn’t allow our website to be included. They are smarter that us.

  65. Mike on Wed, 31st Dec 2008 9:37 am
  66. Thanks for this tip! Excellent advice!

  67. Brian on Wed, 31st Dec 2008 12:28 pm
  68. Good “trick”. Thank you for this information. I will use it on my directory.

  69. Andy on Sun, 1st Feb 2009 5:27 pm
  70. Wow! I am absolutely amazed by the quality of the posts on this site. I have learnt more in the last 10 minutes than in the last two years researching search engine optimization. I think you should set up a membership site. I would glady pay an absolute fortune to join it!

    Keep up the fantastic posts – you are already in my favourites.

    Thank you SO MUCH!

    Your biggest new fan!

    Andy

  71. ktunnel on Mon, 2nd Feb 2009 8:21 pm
  72. tnkhs your for site

  73. investor411 on Wed, 11th Feb 2009 12:19 pm
  74. I have to admit…I am getting tons of new information and a lot of “old reminders” bouncing around in my head from your blog….great work!

  75. Jessica on Fri, 24th Jul 2009 6:43 am
  76. Great Post

  77. scooter motorcycles on Sat, 19th Dec 2009 3:06 pm
  78. Superb post

    Hope i can learn how to do this soon.

    Thanks again

  79. Russell on Sun, 18th Apr 2010 2:39 pm
  80. Hi so where can i find these edu links and gov links?

  81. SEO Speed on Tue, 22nd Jun 2010 3:38 am
  82. Nice Information.. I am on my way to follow the steps.

    Thanks

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